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UNDERCURRENTS IN AMERICAN 
POLITICS 



/ 
UNDERCURRENTS 

IN 

AMERICAN POLITICS 



Comprising the Ford Lectures, delivered at 

Oxford University 

AND the Barbour-Page Lectures, delivered at 

The University of Virginia 

IN THE Spring of 1914 



BY 

ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

President of Yale University 




NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXV 






^ 



V 



Copyright, 1915 

BY 

Yale University Press 



First printed May, 1915, 1000 copies 



M 2 1915 
©a,A401198 



PREFACE 

In the spring of 1914 it was my privilege to 
deliver the Barbour-Page Lectures at the Univer- 
sity of Virginia and the Ford Lectures at Oxford 
University. As the two courses dealt with kindred 
subjects, I am publishing them in a single volume. 

The whole might well have been entitled ' ' Extra- 
Constitutional Government in the United States.'' 
The Oxford Lectures, on Property and Democracy, 
show how a great many organized activities of the 
community have been kept out of government con- 
trol altogether. The Virginia Lectures, on Politi- 
cal Methods, show how those matters which were 
left in government hands have often been managed 
by very different agencies from those which the 
framers of our Constitution intended. 

As the first three lectures were delivered to an 
English audience, they contain some explanations 
which are unnecessary for American readers; but 
it seemed on the whole better to print them in their 
original form. 



vi PREFACE 

When so wide a range of topics is treated in so 
small a book, it is impossible to give any adequate 
set of references to authorities. I have tried in the 
several lectures to make due acknowledgment to 
the men who have most nearly anticipated my lines 
of thought or have furnished me with the largest 
budgets of illustrative facts; but I have only been 
able to name a few among the many to whom I am 
thus indebted. 

Yale University, New Haven 
April 1915 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 
PROPERTY AND DEMOCRACY 

Lecture I 

The Gradual Development op American 
Democracy ..... 3 

Colonial organization was essentially aris- 
tocratic ...... 3 

Keligious exclusiveness in New England, 4. 
Large land grants in middle colonies, 6. Effect 
of slavery in south, 8. 

Independence made no immediate change 

in this respect ..... 10 

Universal suffrage not adopted, 11. High prop- 
erty qualifications, 11. Leaders of both parties 
aristocratic, 13. 

The turning point came in 1820 with the 

advent of a new generation ... 14 

Effect of political watchwords, 15. Effect of 
Hamilton's land policy, 16. Western type of 
man and commonwealth, 20. Andrew Jackson, 20. 
Political democracy established before 1840, 22. 

The political change was attended with a 
social change, but not with an industrial 
one ....... 25 

Contrast between Europe and America, 27. 
Absence of labor legislation, 27. Socialistic agi- 
tation not effective, 30. 



viii CONTENTS 

Lecture II 

The Constitutional Position of the Prop- 
erty Owner . . : . . 32 

The American political and social system is 
based on industrial property rights . 33 
Traditional opposition between military and in- 
dustrial classes in Europe, 33. No such tradition 
in America, 35. Working and fighting power in 
same hands, 36. 

These rights have been protected by a con- 
stitutional compact .... 37 

Character of the Constitutional Convention of 
1787, 38. Balance between home rule party and 
federal party, 39. Immunities given to the 
property owner, 40. The American doctrine of 
sovereignty, 42. 

No serious attempt has been made to amend 
the Constitutional provisions protecting 
property ...... 47 

A democracy of small landowners, 48. Need 
of attracting capital, 49. Freedom of incorpora- 
tion, 51. Constitutional guarantees of corporate 
independence, 53. The Dartmouth College case, 
54. The Fourteenth Amendment and the San 
Mateo case, 55. 

The Civil War produced industrial unrest, 

but not industrial reform ... 56 

Emancipation of slaves, 56. Currency agitation, 
57. High protective tariff, 58. The competitive 
system in America, 59. Its effect on industrial 
efficiency, 62. 



CONTENTS ix 

Lecture III 

Recent Tendencies in Economics and in 

Legislation ..... 64 

Competition did not protect shippers 
against abuse of railway power . . 65 

Sudden discovery of this fact after the civil war, 
66. The Granger movement, 67. Eailway com- 
missions and the Interstate Commerce Act of 
1887, 71. 

Failure of competition was not confined to 
railways ...... 72 

Other public utilities put under control of com- 
missions, 73. Attempt to enforce competition in 
productive industry, 74. The Sherman Anti- 
Trust Act of 1890 not enforced for several years 
after its passage, 75. 

The present century has witnessed the first 
serious movement toward state socialism 
in America ..... 76 

Humanitarian development in Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, 76. Labor agitation ineffective when it 
antagonized small landowners, 78. Change in 
Twentieth Century, 80. Small property owners 
now ranged against the money power, 81. Char- 
acter of new laws passed since 1903, 86. In- 
creased activity in enforcing old laws, 86. Symp- 
toms of a reaction, 88. Practical limits to state 
control in America today, 90. 



CONTENTS 



POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW 

Lecture IV 
The Growth of Party Machinery . . 97 

The perversion of party government . 97 

Two distinct senses of the word party, 99. 
Either a means of organizing public opinion in- 
telligently, or an agency for controlling the 
offices of the country as a source of power and 
livelihood, 99. Second meaning tends to sup- 
plant the first, 101. 

Constitution makes no provision against 
this danger . . . . .102 

Prescribed mode of election and duties of public 
officers, 105. Did not prescribe mode of nomi- 
nation or character of pledges that might be 
exacted of the candidate, 105. 

Actual agencies of nomination . . . 108 

Caucus established 1796, 108. Overthrown 1824, 

109. Substitution of the convention system, 110. 
Made power less responsible instead of more so, 

110. Martin Van Buren, 111. 

Rewards of irresponsible activity . . 113 

Municipal and state offices, 114. Jackson and 
the Federal civil service, 116. Franchises, local 
and national, 118. The tariff and the currency 
as party issues, 120. 



CONTENTS xi 

Lecture Y 
The Reaction against Machine Control . 122 
Ineffective remedies .... 123 

Turning one party out brings the machinery of 
another party into office, 123. Predatory pov- 
erty as dangerous a thing as predatory wealth, 
125. 

Partially effective remedies . . . 127 

Separation of local from national issues, 128. 
Brought to public notice by New York election of 
1871, 129. Local politics made increasingly inde- 
pendent of national party affiliations, 131. Elec- 
tion of United States senators by the people, 
132. Civil service reform, 134, What it has 
accomplished and what it fails to accomplish, 
136. 

Present experiments and tendencies . . 137 

Distrust of the legislature, 137. Direct legis- 
lation through state constitutions, 143. The 
referendum and initiative, 145. The direct pri- 
mary, 146. The recall, 147. 

Lecture VI 
The Seat of Power today .... 149 

Unorganized political opinion ineffective . 149 

New system transfers political chicane from 
party organization to groups of individuals, 151. 
Creation of public sentiment by newspapers, 152. 



xii CONTENTS 

Growth of the independent press . . 153 

The slavery agitation, 154. The campaign 
against Tweed in New York, 155. Pulitzer's 
theory of journalism, 158. Lessened power of 
party leaders, 159. Government by popular 
opinion, 159. 

Unforeseen consequences of the change . 162 
The appeal to emotion, 163. The appeal to im- 
patience, 167. Theory of popular omniscience, 
170. Undervaluation of the expert, 172. True 
function of voters in a democracy, 174. 

Index ....... 181 



PEOPEETY AND DEMOCEACY 



THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF 
AMEEICAN DEMOCEACY 

At the time of the adoption of the federal con- 
stitution in 1788 neither the United States as a 
whole, nor any of the several commonwealths of 
which it was composed, was a democracy in the 
modern sense of the word. 

Ever since their original settlement the political 
and social system of the English colonies in 
North America had been essentially aristocratic. 
Nowhere among them do we find universal suffrage. 
The right to vote was always confined to taxpayers, 
and almost always to freeholders. In one colony 
the minimum freehold qualification for the suffrage 
was a thousand acres. Nor were the voters as a 
body generally allowed the privilege of choosing 
the chief magistrates. The higher administrative 
officers were either appointed by the crown or 
elected by councils composed of a few of the richest 
and most influential citizens. The man of small 
means and unconsidered ancestry had very little 
direct participation in the affairs of state. 



4 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Of course the conditions varied in different parts 
of the country. The nearest approach to democracy 
was found northeast of the Hudson river, in the 
colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode 
Island and Connecticut. The settlers in this dis- 
trict were for the most part Puritans. The region 
was so inhospitable that it did not attract men of 
wealth. In three of the four colonies a religious 
rather than a commercial motive had been domi- 
nant in the foundation. There was no opportunity 
for the growth of a leisure class, nor would public 
sentiment have approved of it if there had been. 
But though the New England freeholders were 
poor, they were exclusive. Though they tilled their 
own lands, it did not prevent them from being 
politically arrogant, any more than the same cause 
had prevented a Cincinnatus or a Fabius from 
being politically arrogant in the early days of the 
Roman republic. The freeman of a Massachusetts 
commonwealth looked upon new settlers who 
aspired to become freemen with much the same 
suspicious eye with which the Roman patrician 
regarded his plebeian neighbors. 

These suspicions were most strongly manifested 
when the new settlers held a different creed from 
the older ones. The original emigrants to Massa- 
chusetts were Congregationalists. They looked 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 5 

upon members of any other sect as men of doubtful 
character, not to be trusted with the administration 
of a growing commonwealth. Woe to the Episco- 
palian who held that his Lares and Penates were 
as good politically as those of his Congregational 
brother! During the earlier years of the history 
of Massachusetts the charter required that the 
freemen should be godly ; and the Puritan founders 
of the colony doubted very gravely whether the 
Thirty-nine Articles were a sufficiently acceptable 
road to godliness to make it wise to trust the 
Episcopalian with the franchise. Even when the 
franchise itself had been more liberally bestowed 
and political power had thus become diffused 
through the whole body of freeholders, the spirit 
of social exclusiveness remained almost unchanged. 
For a great deal of the work of New England 
society centered around the church rather than the 
state ; and the church was controlled by the 
descendants of the original settlers.* 

* The parallel between the aristocracy of New England 
and the aristocracy of the early Eoman republic has much 
interest and significance. 

In either case the aristocrats were at once farmers and 
fighters, tilling the soil and resisting the enemy by turns. 
In either case there was a body of outside or plebeian 
neighbors, some of whom were just as wealthy as any of 
the patrician aristocrats, who were for a time excluded 



6 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

What was conspicuously true of Massachusetts 
was true to a somewhat less degree in the other 
New England colonies. They were societies of poor 
but proud aristocrats. Connecticut was in some 
respects the most independent and democratic of 
all the New England commonwealths. Yet even in 
Connecticut class distinctions were so strong that 
down to the very eve of the Revolution the names 
of the students in the catalogue of Yale College 
were arranged, not in alphabetical rank, but in the 
order of the respectability of their parentage. 

In the group of colonies immediately southwest 

from the offices and privileges of the state. The barrier 
which separated the different classes from one another, 
whether in Eome or in Massachusetts, was not primarily 
a political but a religious one. The plebeian had not the 
same gods as the patrician. The Episcopalian had not the 
same gods as the Congregationalist. Long after the plebeian 
had obtained equal rights to military offtces like the consul- 
ship or the dictatorship, he was excluded from semi-religious 
positions like that of the praetor. The same thing holds 
good in Massachusetts. Both in Eome and in New England 
the ruling class, when compelled to grant political equality, 
tried to keep a modicum of their old power by reserving a 
good deal of public authority to the representatives of the 
church of the founders. This authority the outsider could 
not claim to share merely because he shared the franchise 
or the right of holding military command, unless he had 
gone through the process which the Massachusetts Christian 
described in terms borrowed from the phraseology of pagan 
Eome — the process of ' ' sanctification and adoption.'' 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 7 

of the Hudson river the social system was of a 
different kind. There was much less religious 
exclusiveness, there was much more commercial 
inequality. Neither the Dutch in New York, the 
Quakers in Pennsylvania, nor the Catholics who 
followed Lord Baltimore to Maryland, showed the 
same degree of bigotry and intolerance that ani- 
mated the settlers of New England. These colonies 
were to a greater or less extent trading ventures, 
in which the heads of the enterprise reserved for 
themselves the dominant influence in the direction 
and control of affairs. Instead of a religious 
aristocracy of small farmers, we therefore find a 
commercial aristocracy of traders and planters. 
The agricultural land of New York was largely 
held by a few patroons or semi-feudal overlords; 
a system originally established by the Dutch but 
not essentially altered or disturbed when the 
colony passed under British sovereignty. The 
charters of the other colonies in this region— New 
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland — 
either explicitly provided for a similar form of 
organization or tacitly encouraged it. In all these 
colonies, therefore, the influence of a comparatively 
small number of wealthy citizens was dominant. 

This dominance of wealth was even more marked 
south of the Potomac, in the colonies or plantations 



8 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The 
agricultural conditions of this region made a 
system of large holdings or plantations profitable 
both to the colonists themselves and to the fiscal 
agents of the mother country. Inequalities of 
wealth which in the middle colonies were an 
accident became in the southern colonies an indus- 
trial advantage if not an economic necessity. 
Moreover the southern plantations were particu- 
larly suitable to the employment of slave labor — 
first that of convicts or redemptioners, and after- 
ward of negroes imported for the purpose. As is 
generally the case where slavery prevails, the body 
of freemen graduallj^ divided itself into two 
classes: those who were rich enough to own slaves 
and those who were not. The former class, as is 
usual in such communities, succeeded in engrossing 
the political authority; partly by law, partly by 
political maneuvering, and partly by the force of 
social usage. 

According to a report of the Surveyor General 
of the Colonial Customs at the beginning of the 
eighteenth century, quoted by Hildreth,* there were 

* The account of colonial conditions given by Hildreth is 
in many respects better than that which we have received 
from later historians. Hildreth 's merits have been some- 
what underrated, owing to his intense partisanship in deal- 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 9 

in Virginia on each of the four great rivers men 
in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and 
industry had "gotten very competent estates." 
These gentlemen took care to supply the poorer 
sort with goods and necessaries, and were sure to 
keep them always in their debt and consequently 
dependent on them. Out of this number were 
chosen the council, assembly, justices, and other 
officers of government. The justices, besides their 
judicial functions, managed the business and 
finances of their respective counties. Parish affairs 
were in the hands of self-perpetuating vestries, 
which kept even the ministers in check by avoiding 
induction and hiring them only from year to year. 
The twelve counselors possessed extensive author- 
ity ; their assent was necessary to all the governor 's 
official acts; they constituted one branch of the 

ing with American political history at the end of the 
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century; but 
his treatment of early colonial affairs is comparatively 
unaffected by this partisanship, and shows the good effect 
of contact, personal and social, with colonial traditions. 
The men with whom Hildreth had talked in his boyhood 
came of these colonial families whose methods and doings 
he described. They had retained to a surprisingly large 
extent the prejudices and feelings of their grandfathers. 
In spite of his late date Hildreth thus speaks in the 
character of an eyewitness. There is, I believe, no other 
American historian of whom this fact is true in approxi- 
mately equal extent. 



10 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Assembly; they exercised the principal judicial 
authority as judges of the General Court; they 
were at the head of the militia as lieutenants of 
the counties; they acted as collectors of the export 
duty on tobacco and the other provincial imposts, 
and generally also of the Parliamentary duties, 
while they farmed the king's quit-rents at a very 
favorable bargain. A majority of these counselors, 
united together by a sort of family compact, 
aspired to engross the entire management of the 
province. 

All this is doubtless somewhat overstated. Con- 
ditions were probably not as bad as this in 1705, 
when the report was written; they certainly were 
not as bad at the time of the Revolution. But we 
are quite safe in saying that Thomas Jefferson's 
doctrines of political equality were not drawn from 
an observation of the practices that prevailed in 
his immediate neighborhood. 

The Revolution of 1776 severed the relation of 
the colonies to the mother country but did not 
greatly alter the constitutions under which they 
were organized. These constitutions continued to 
follow the lines set down in the colonial charters in 
all respects except those which concerned the Eng- 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 11 

lish overlord. Before the Revolution most of the 
colonies had been compelled to accept the governors 
appointed by the crown; after the Revolution the 
leading citizens elected their own governors and 
fixed the bounds of their authority; but with 
that exception the machinery was arranged and 
conducted in pretty much the same manner as 
before. No immediate attempt was made to extend 
the right of suffrage or to increase the proportion 
of elective offices. The property qualifications 
demanded of officeholders remained very high. 
In South Carolina, to quote an extreme instance, 
no man could serve as governor unless he owned 
property to the value of ten thousand pounds; 
which even in the depreciated currency was an 
enormous sum for that time. The social order was 
essentially an aristocratic one — not quite so much 
so as it was in England at that time, but very much 
more so than it is in England today. While the 
right to stand for office was not denied to qualified 
voters of proper age and substance, the actual 
holding of office was chiefly enjoyed by such persons 
as happened to belong to families of standing and 
consideration. 

Nor did the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
involve any necessary or immediate change in these 
particulars. This constitution indeed provided 



12 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

that each of the several federated states should 
have a republican form of government. But to 
the makers of the Federal Constitution the word 
''republican" did not mean democratic. The 
members of the convention that drafted it were 
representatives of the conservative class in the 
community. Their "republic" was the equivalent 
of Aristotle's "politeia, " or self-governing com- 
monwealth. Most of them would have been horror- 
stricken at the idea of universal suffrage. There 
was indeed in all the states a strong minority of 
real democrats, many of whom opposed the adop- 
tion of the Constitution. But the necessity of 
having an efficient central government was so 
obvious that the views of the conservative party 
prevailed decisively; and the outspoken champions 
of democracy were forced to acquiesce, as best they 
might, in the adoption of a polity which some of 
them regarded as a betrayal of the cause of popular 
liberty. 

The conservatives or Federalists remained in 
control for twelve years after they had secured 
the passage of the Constitution. Then it was the 
turn of the Democrats, who came into power with 
the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. It is, 
however, significant of the state of popular feeling 
at the time that the advent of the popular party 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 13 

to office was signalized by no important political 
or social changes.* Jefferson's administration 
illustrated the old adage, "A radical plus power 
equals a conservative." The leaders of the Demo- 
crats, like the leaders of the Federalists, were for 
the most part representatives of old families. 
Madison and Monroe bore as respectable names as 
"Washington or Adams. Aaron Burr, arch-democrat 
and corrupter of society, who taught Tammany 
Hall the methods which have made New York 
politics a byword, was of as good social standing 
as Alexander Hamilton, friend of Washington and 
founder of the republic's fiscal system. 

To make America a democracy, in fact as well 
as in name, it was not enough for one party to pass 
out of power. It was necessary for one whole 
generation to pass off the stage and give place to 

* The apparent change of front by the Democratic leaders 
in the years immediately following the adoption of the 
United States Constitution was due to two causes. 

In the first place, the formation of a centralized govern- 
ment under the new constitution was actually followed by 
a high degree of prosperity. The years preceding 1788 had 
been a time of depression. The decade that immediately 
followed was one of commercial expansion. It was natural, 
and in fact inevitable, that this change from depression 
to prosperity should be attributed to the Constitution and 
that that instrument should become popular with everybody 
who benefited by the commercial improvement. 

The views of the extreme Democrats were further dis- 



14 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

a new generation with other antecedents and other 
ideals. Until about the year 1820 the citizens of 
the United States were British subjects who had 
accidentally transferred their allegiance without 
correspondingly altering their political instincts. 
The United States remained in many essential 
features a group of English colonies, separated 
from the mother country in 1776, somewhat against 
their will, by the want of tact of George the Third 
and his ministers, and united with one another in 
1788, also somewhat against their will, by the 
extraordinary tact of the leaders of the Consti- 
tutional Convention. Colonial, however, they 
remained in feeling, and separate also to a large 
degree in feeling, for twenty or thirty years 
afterward. 

But with the advent of a new generation things 
were altered. Farrand, who among all our histo- 

credited by the history of the French Eevolution in 1792 
and 1793. The excesses of the Eeign of Terror gave 
conservatives in America as well as in England strong 
arguments against putting unrestricted power in the hands 
of the masses, and made Democrats themselves doubt 
whether their own theories of popular government were as 
good practical guides as they had previously supposed. 
Jefferson and his immediate followers never abandoned 
their belief in the people, but they modified to some extent 
their desire to trust the people with the direct exercise of 
administrative authority. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 15 

rians is probably best qualified to judge of this 
point, dates the real beginning of distinctively 
American history, not from the declaration of 
independence in 1776 nor from the adoption of 
the Constitution in 1788, but from the close of 
the War of 1812. The years following this war 
witnessed the birth of a true national spirit, which 
was at once American and democratic. 

Several causes combined to produce this change. 
First among them was the effect of the Declaration 
of Independence itself upon boys who were taught 
to read it. ''We hold these truths to be self- 
evident," said the writers of the Declaration, 
''that all men are created equal, that they are 
endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalien- 
able rights, that among these are life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness." To the men of 1776 
this sentence was simply a convenient phrase for 
justifying acts of armed resistance to England 
which had been committed by the several colonies 
in the past and were likely to be continued on a 
larger scale and with more organized purpose in 
the immediate future. The writers believed them 
in the same way that they believed other political 
doctrines of Locke or Rousseau; that is, they gave 
them a sufficient measure of intellectual assent to 
be able to use them as a basis of argument without 



16 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

violating their consciences. But they were not 
ready to accept them as part of the sentiment which 
underlay their estimate of their fellow men and 
the conduct of their own daily life. With the next 
generation the case was different. What had been 
a phrase to the fathers was an article of faith to 
the sons. They had learned in their earliest and 
most impressionable years that this was the prin- 
ciple upon which the American nation was founded. 
It was this, they were taught, which more than 
anything else differentiated American society from 
European society. What had been at first a mere 
proposition regarding equality became under such 
influences a sentiment in favor of equality. The 
feeling of patriotism was enlisted to drive out the 
old feeling of caste prejudice. The sentiments of 
human equality and of national pride were in fact 
so closely bound up with one another that whatever 
strengthened the second strengthened the first. 
The war against England from 1812 to 1815, 
unfortunate as it was in many of its incidents, laid 
the foundation for a new intensity of patriotic 
feeling and new enthusiasm for human equality. 

Of equal importance in promoting the spirit of 
democracy was the system of land laws under 
which the West was settled. 

The greater part of the actual area of the United 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 17 

States at the end of the eighteenth century was 
the property of the national government, unen- 
cumbered by claims of individuals or corporations. 
The thirteen states that formed the Union occupied 
only a small fringe along the Atlantic coast. Some 
of them held grants of land in the interior by 
virtue of their colonial charters ; but the total area 
effectively covered by these grants was not large 
in amount. Speaking broadly, the immense domain 
in the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi was 
at the disposal of the federal authorities. The 
power thus held by the United States Government 
was wisely used. Alexander Hamilton, Washing- 
ton's secretary of the treasury, was a man who 
understood the larger principles of statesmanship 
better than any other American of his age. He 
saw that in the disposal of this land fiscal consid- 
erations should be subordinated to political ones; 
that the most valuable thing which a democracy 
could do with a public domain was to settle it with 
as large a number as possible of actual freeholders. 
In pursuance of this policy, arrangements were 
made for the survey of the public lands at as early 
a date as possible. Lines were run at intervals of 
half a mile, both from north to south and from 
east to west, dividing the country into square 
sections of the area of a quarter of a mile, or one 



18 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

hundred and sixty acres, each. These are the 
quarter sections so constantly alluded to in the 
land laws of the United States. On the lands thus 
surveyed the price was first fixed at $2.00 an acre, 
which was afterwards generally reduced to $1.25. 

But this cheap rate was not the only inducement 
offered to settlers. By a series of "preemption 
acts" from 1801 to 1841 a man who had actually 
settled upon public land without paying for it was 
given prior claim to its ultimate ownership. It 
was, as it were, reserved for a time when he might 
be ready to purchase. Nobody could buy it over 
his head. The result of these Preemption Acts was 
that a man who did not have the money to buy the 
land could enter and take possession of it, with the 
assurance that if he made proper improvements he 
would be given a chance not only to get the benefit 
of his improvements, but ultimately to buy the 
land itself out of the proceeds of his successful 
farming. 

Hamilton built even better than he knew. The 
political consideration that he felt most strongly 
was the danger of foreign invasion. The United 
States held the central and western parts of the 
continent by rather a precarious tenure. The 
colonies that had revolted from England were 
stretched along the Atlantic seaboard. A range 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 19 

of mountains, not very high but rugged and almost 
unbroken, separated them from the interior valleys. 
The first settlement in these interior valleys had 
been made, not across the mountains but by the 
Mississippi on the south or the St. Lawrence on 
the north. Spain held the lower Mississippi; 
England held the lower St. Lawrence. Most of 
the permanent white residents of the Mississippi 
valley were French. The names of the older towns 
show the kind of population with which we had 
to deal: Yincennes, Terre Haute, St. Louis. The 
ideals and institutions of the newly founded 
United States had no particular attraction for the 
inhabitants of towns with names like these. A war 
with either England or Spain — or, for that matter, 
a war with France — ^might easily have deprived 
the states of the Atlantic seaboard of the slender 
hold they had on the interior. As a result 
of Hamilton's land policy the interior valleys of 
the West were rapidly settled by a population 
distinctively American in its ideals and senti- 
ments. This settlement, taken in conjunction with 
Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and the upper 
Mississippi valley from the French and Spanish 
claimants, secured the country against the danger 
of war on the western frontier. 

This was the immediate and obvious effect of 



20 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Hamilton's policy. But it had also an effect on 
our internal constitution, less obvious but much 
more fundamentally important. It created a type 
of commonwealth and type of man which was 
distinctively American. Our lands were occupied 
by a body of men of great ability and enterprise 
but small capital; men who were ready to work 
and respected others in proportion to their readi- 
ness to work. In the region beyond the Alleghany 
mountains the sort of equality contemplated by 
the Declaration of Independence was in large 
measure realized. In the valleys on either side of 
the Ohio river America witnessed for the first time 
the growth of commonwealths that had never been 
colonies but grew up to statehood independently; 
communities that had never known crown governors 
and crown grants, but had developed under the 
American flag and the preemption law. Owing 
to the conditions under which they were founded, 
these western communities were intensely patriotic 
and intensely convinced of the essential equality 
of all mankind. 

Under the operation of these causes there arose 
a new democracy, different from anything which 
was readily conceivable by an earlier generation. 
Of this new American democracy Andrew Jackson, 
elected to the presidency in 1828, was the chosen 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 21 

representative. Of all the presidents of the United 
States he was the one who sprang most directly 
from the people; and the years of his triumph 
were marked by the development of the distinctive 
features which we have been accustomed to regard 
as characteristic of American political life — the 
adoption of universal suffrage, the multiplication 
of elective ofSces, and the complex system of party 
organization which has lasted with but slight 
change until the present time.* 

* It is somewhat singular that the democratic America 
of a later generation should have so occupied the minds of 
historians as to crowd out the memory of the aristocratic 
America of earlier times. There are several reasons which 
may serve to account for this. 

In the first place, the foreign observers of America whose 
accounts were most widely read saw the country after the 
change instead of before it. The earliest of these accounts 
was that by Chevalier, who investigated the American trans- 
portation system and published his results in a masterly 
work, ' ' Les Voies de Communication en Amerique. ' ' The 
political change was not complete at the date of Chevalier's 
visit, but the parts of the country which he saw were those 
where development was most active and the new spirit of 
democracy most manifest. 

Another Frenchman whose books were more widely read 
and whose views had much larger influence than Chevalier's 
was Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville studied America 
carefully and was a man of eminent ability both as an 
observer and as a critic; but he was a thorough Frenchman, 
and he had a Frenchman's fondness for brilliant generali- 
zation. Taking the America of the fourth decade of the 



22 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

These developments were not consciously intro- 
duced as party measures by the national govern- 
ment. Under the American Constitution they 
could not be. The several states have to decide 
for themselves what qualifications shall be required 
of their voters and how their officers shall be 
elected or appointed. It is all the more significant, 
therefore, that such a fundamental change in public 
opinion should have taken place in so many 
commonwealths at the same time, and that a nation, 
till then predominantly aristocratic in its social 
constitution, should have become so thoroughly 
democratic in so short a period. 

In the two decades from 1820 to 1840 new states 
were organized which gave full rights of sover- 

nineteenth century as he saw it, lie reasoned that the prin- 
ciples of political action which then prevailed were an 
inherent result of the American character, foreordained and 
predestined from the beginning. His observations concern- 
ing the times of which he wrote were so just that people 
attached undue weight to his statements of antecedent con- 
ditions, which were not based upon his own observation and 
were in some instances not correct. If De Tocqueville 's 
judgments had been unflattering to the American public, 
some of his historical generalizations would have been more 
readily challenged. But De Tocqueville, though not a ful- 
some critic, was a friendly one. His explanations furnished 
American readers with plausible excuses for many of the 
faults of their social system. When Mrs. Trollope criticised 
American manners malignantly, or when Charles Dickens did 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 23 

eignty to all men who were personally free; and 
older states like New York and Massachusetts 
abolished property qualifications for the franchise 
that had previously existed. The number of officers 
directly chosen by the people was multiplied. 
The pecuniary qualification required for the various 
offices was lessened or abolished. The whole sys- 
tem of nomination and election was so modified 
as to give more immediate influence to the will of 
the people and less to that of the leading families. 
Even for those offices whose incumbents were 
appointed by the executive instead of being elected, 
the old principle of fixity of tenure during good 
behavior was quite generally abolished, and the 
office itself made a reward of party service. 

the same thing more goodnaturedlj and humorously, it was 
a pleasure to fall back on De Tocqueville and to say that 
these evils were but the incidental defects of an inherent 
spirit of democracy which had always prevailed in the 
United States and which made people disregard the niceties 
of custom and convention in order to appraise men at their 
true value. 

This is not intended as a criticism of De Tocqueville, who 
next to Bryce and possibly Ostrogorski, is the ablest foreign 
writer on American affairs; but to show why some of the 
less essential parts of his work gained undue influence over 
the public mind and contributed to a misunderstanding of 
earlier American history from which hardly any of our 
modern writers except Farrand and McMaster have been 
able to keep themselves wholly free. 



24 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

These changes were more rapid and complete in 
the northern and central states than in the 
southern ones; but every section felt the effect of 
this movement in greater or less degree. With 
surprising speed and thoroughness the country as 
a whole passed from a political system which was 
in its essentials aristocratic and English to one 
which was democratic and American. 

Even more remarkable than the rapidity of the 
change itself was the absence of any reaction of 
feeling or retrogression of practice such as usually 
follows in the wake of rapid reform movements 
of this sort. When the Democrats went out of 
office and their opponents, now called Whigs 
instead of Federalists, came into power, there was 
no attempt to bring government back to its old 
basis. Parties divided on other lines. The 
Democrats stood for free trade, the Whigs for 
protection. The Democrats stood for home rule, 
the Whigs for national authority. A few years 
later, as a result of the struggle between home rule 
and nationalism, the Democrats stood for slavery 
and the Republicans (who had succeeded the old 
Whig party) for emancipation. But in none of 
these American political conflicts of the middle of 
the nineteenth century could one party claim the 
title of conservative and the other that of liberal, 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 25 

as these titles were understood and used in the 
politics of contemporary European states. The 
political triumph of democracy was complete. 

This transformation of the political order was 
attended by a similar change in the social order; 
though the social change was for various reasons 
less rapid and complete than the political one. 

The society of the West had been from the first 
quite as democratic as its politics. There was but 
one important class distinction — that between 
workers and idlers. If a settler was willing to 
work he could get large returns with very little 
capital ; if he was not willing to work there was no 
place for him. Under such circumstances a man 
could achieve social position in three ways only: 
by hospitality, by professional efficiency, or by 
securing public office. Wealth without hospitality, 
education without efficiency, honorable descent 
without public service, were not regarded as social 
qualifications. They were despised rather than 
admired. 

These social standards — or, if you please, this 
absence of social standards — of the West had a 
marked effect on the Atlantic coast. Almost every 
Eastern family numbered among its members one 
or two who had "gone West"; who had proved 
their fitness as men under the new conditions, and 



26 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

were inclined to despise the social order of older 
communities as artificial. These men were apt to 
be of a type strong enough to modify the views, 
not only of their own family circles, but of the 
whole community from which they came. 

In the northern Atlantic states this modification 
was very rapid. In the southern states it was 
slower. The North had been an aristocracy of 
small farmers who cultivated their own ground. 
The South had been an aristocracy of large 
planters who lived on the produce of the slaves. 
When members of slave-holding families moved 
westward they often carried their slaves with them, 
and by this means succeeded to some extent in 
perpetuating in the new country the class dis- 
tinction which had subsisted in the old. While the 
general structure of Northern social life began to 
change in 1820, that of the South remained un- 
changed for a generation more; until the civil 
war of 1861, with the resulting enfranchisement 
of the negro and impoverishment of the large land- 
holders, had taken away the physical basis on which 
it had rested for more than a century so securely. 

But these changes in the political and social 
order were not accompanied by any corresponding 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 27 

change in the industrial order. It has been a 
perpetual surprise to observers of American insti- 
tutions that complete political enfranchisement has 
not resulted in attempts to restrict the power of 
capital. For at least sixty years after the adoption 
of universal suffrage the tendency was all in the 
other direction — to legislate for the property owner 
rather than against him; to strengthen the powers 
of capital rather than to diminish them. Demo- 
crats, Whigs, and Republicans differed as to their 
aims and methods, but they vied with one another 
in protecting the rights of property. Even on the 
remote and comparatively lawless western frontier, 
where a man might kill a dozen of his fellow men 
with impunity and enjoy the continued respect 
of those about him, the stealing of a horse was 
punished by immediate hanging and by the for- 
feiture of all claim to social standing in this world 
or the next. 

The small protection given to the rights of man, 
as compared with that which was accorded to the 
rights of property, is a salient feature in the early 
history of every American state — and sometimes 
in its later history also. "While England was 
developing a large and on the whole highly 
beneficent body of factory Acts, the United States 
was doing nothing. It is only forty years since the 



28 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

first effective law regarding hours of labor was 
passed by the state of Massachusetts, limiting 
the hours of women and children to about ten a 
day ; and even this was regarded at the time of its 
passage as a piece of somewhat dangerous humani- 
tarianism. As late as 1885 the attempt to keep 
children out of factories until they were twelve 
years old was considered by many people a radical 
measure of interference with economic freedom. 
While England had been developing a system of 
employers' liability adequate to protect the work- 
men under modern conditions, the United States 
stood for many years idle. The old common law 
doctrine that the employee assumed the risks of 
his employment, and that the employer was not 
liable for damages for an injury to one workman 
resulting from the carelessness of another, remained 
in full force in America for many years after it 
had been done away with in England. The 
employer was encouraged by his immunity from 
responsibility to maintain antiquated methods and 
practices dangerous to life and limb, which he alone 
could change and for whose ill effects he was 
morally though not legally responsible. Systems 
of industrial insurance were devised in monarchies 
like Prussia ; they were unknown in the democratic 
commonwealths of America, Progressive taxation 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 29 

has been used by nearly every country of Europe 
as a means of correcting the inequalities of 
wealth. Not until the most recent times has the 
American democracy attempted to employ it for 
this purpose.* 

These are but a few among the many instances 
of democratic concern for the interests of the 
property owner and democratic unconcern for the 
interests of humanity. Even in those exceptional 
cases where the Americans of the nineteenth cen- 
tury passed laws to restrict the power of capital, 
we generally find that they were intended to pro- 
tect one class of capitalists against the encroach- 
ments of another. Forty years ago there was a 
successful agitation to abolish the practice indulged 
in by many manufacturers of maintaining '' com- 
pany stores" at which their workmen were com- 
pelled to trade ; but the reform was carried through 
not so much because of the injury to the workmen 
who had to trade at the stores, as because of the 
injury to other stores that did not belong to the 
company. There was during the same period an 
active and widespread attempt to reduce the rates 

* There was a certain amount of progression in the income 
taxes of the Civil War. But these taxes were introduced as 
revenue measures under stress of fiscal necessity, and were 
abolished amid general rejoicing from all parties as soon 
as possible after the close of the war. 



30 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

charged by railroads in the upper Mississippi 
valley; but this was avowedly based on the fact 
that the higher rates prevented the farmers whom 
the railroads served from paying interest on their 
mortgages. 

From time to time we find traces of discontent 
with the industrial system as a whole. From time 
to time socialist leaders would arise who attempted 
to organize the laboring classes of the community 
for a war against capital. Agitators of this kind 
made their most forcible appeal to immigrants 
who had recently arrived in the country and were 
not familiar with American laws and customs. 
There was a widespread socialistic movement of 
this kind in 1833; there have been sporadic ones 
ever since. Some of this agitation aroused a good 
deal of public interest and a little fear among the 
more timid capitalists. But as long as there was 
plenty of free land in the United States the socialist 
agitators were at a disadvantage. The immigrant 
felt that he had more to gain by settling down and 
trying to become a capitalist than by going to war 
and trying to fight the capitalist. He was inclined 
to say to the agitators what the boy said to the 
lady who offered him sponge cake at a party, "I 
can get as good as that at home." He might be 
ready to applaud the men who declaimed against 



DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 31 

the injustice of this or that particular arrange- 
ment of industrial society; he was not ready to 
declare war against an industrial society which 
offered him so many inducements to become one 
of its members. It was the rule all through the 
nineteenth century that as long as the socialist 
orators stuck to words the multitude applauded 
them, but whenever their words were followed by 
deeds the multitude shrank from them. At bye- 
elections the socialists won occasional victories; at 
elections of national importance their vote was 
habitually a disappointment to the leaders of the 
party. 

I propose in the next lecture to examine the 
reasons why democracy did not lead to socialism; 
why universal suffrage was not used to impair the 
dominance of the property owner; why the legal 
and constitutional position of property in America 
remained for a series of years stronger than it was 
in England in the same period. In the third lecture 
I propose to examine the effect of certain changes 
in the United States during recent years which 
have brought America, for the first time in its 
history, face to face with what Europe knows as 
the social question. 



II 

THE CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF 
THE PEOPERTY OWNER 

European observers of American politics are apt 
to be surprised at a certain weakness of action in 
industrial matters on the part of our public 
authorities. The legislatures are often ready to 
pass individual measures of regulation; they are 
rarely willing to pursue a consistent and carefully 
developed policy for the attainment of an economic 
end. The people frequently declaim against the 
extent of the powers of corporate capital ; they are 
seldom disposed to put that capital under the direct 
management of the government itself. The man 
who talks loudest of the abuses of private railroad 
administration often shrinks from the alternative 
of having railroads owned and managed by the 
state. 

In spite of frequent acts of adverse legislation, 
the constitutional position of the property owner 
in the United States has been stronger than in any 
country in Europe. However much public feeling 
may at times move in the direction of socialistic 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 33 

measures, there is no nation which is so far removed 
from socialism as ours by its organic law and its 
habits of political action. I propose to trace, as 
far as is possible within the limits of a single 
lecture, the reasons for this somewhat anomalous 
condition; to show why the rights of property 
were so strongly protected in the Federal Consti- 
tution, as originally adopted by the several states 
and as subsequently interpreted by the courts ; and 
why as a matter of history the charige of the social 
and political order from an aristocracy to a democ- 
racy has not been accompanied by anything like 
a corresponding change in the industrial order.* 

I shall begin with a proposition which may sound 
somewhat startling, but which I believe to be 
literally true. The whole American political and 
social system is based on industrial property right, 
far more completely than has ever been the case in 
any European country. In every nation of Europe 
there has been a certain amount of traditional 
opposition between the government and the indus- 
trial classes. In the United States no such 
tradition exists. In the public law of European 
communities industrial freeholding is a compara- 

* For a suggestive treatment of this subject from a some- 
what different standpoint, see W. E. Weyl, The New 
Democracy. 



34 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

tively recent development. In the United States, 
on the contrary, industrial freeholding is the 
foundation on which the whole social order has 
been established and built up. 

Let us examine the reasons for this in detail. 

Down to the thirteenth century the system of 
land tenure in every country of Europe was a 
feudal one. It was based upon military service. 
A man held a larger or smaller estate on account 
of his larger or smaller amount of fighting effi- 
ciency. There were many rival claimants for the 
land. The majority of those who wanted to 
cultivate the soil were unable to protect themselves 
against spoliation. In the absence of an efficient 
protector or overlord no industry was productive 
and no large accumulation of capital was possible. 
The services of the military chieftain were indis- 
pensable as a basis for the toil of the laborer or 
the forethought of the capitalist. It was the 
military chieftain, therefore, who enjoyed the 
largest measure of respect socially, and the 
strongest position politically. 

As the conditions of public security grew better 
these things changed. From the fourteenth cen- 
tury to the nineteenth Europe witnessed a gradual 
substitution of industrial tenures for military 
tenures; a gradual development of a system of 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 35 

property law intended to encourage the activities 
of the laborers and the capitalists, rather than to 
reward the services of the successful military- 
chieftain.* But down to the end of the eighteenth 
century this capitalistic or industrial sort of pri- 
vate property represented a superadded element 
rather than an integral basis of society. And even 
the developments of the last hundred years have 
not been sufficient to obliterate a certain sense of 
newness when we contrast the position of the 
aristocracy of wealth with that of the aristocracy 
of military rank. 

In the American colonies conditions were wholly 
different. There was no marked separation of 
military and industrial classes. The working 
power and the fighting power were in the hands 
of the same or nearly the same persons. The land 
owner held his property by a title which was at 
once military and industrial. He was prepared 
to defend it; he was also prepared to work upon 
it, or at any rate to direct the labor of others who 
worked upon it. There was no excuse from mili- 
tary duty except physical weakness. There was no 
excuse from industrial duty except public service. 

* The experience of England in this matter has been well 
set forth in the earlier chapters of Ashley's English 
Economic History. 



36 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Of course there was a certain differentiation of 
employment. There were some men, like Leather- 
stocking in Cooper's tales, who were specially 
skilled in the ways of Indian fighting; and when 
trouble with the Indians was anticipated, as it 
quite frequently was, it was understood that these 
men might leave their farms to be tilled by others. 
But when peace returned the Indian fighter went 
to work like his neighbors. Aristocratic as the 
colonies were in many of their habits and feelings, 
they would not tolerate the growth of a leisure 
class. If a man had more land than his fellows, 
or enjoyed more authority than his fellows, it was 
expected that he would work harder and fight 
harder. And this expectation was generally 
realized. There was a well-defined aristocracy; 
but there was no military aristocracy as distin- 
guished from an industrial one, except in the 
immediate entourage of the governors sent over 
from England. And the effect of the aristocratic 
circle surrounding these governors was to weaken 
rather than to strengthen the claims of military 
authority, because its members made themselves so 
unpopular by their habitual exclusiveness and 
intolerance that they united the colonists in a spirit 
of resistance to all such claims and pretensions. 

At the time, therefore, when the United States 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 37 

separated from England, respect for industrial 
property right was a fundamental principle in the 
law and public opinion of the land. How far this 
respect for property right would have continued 
unimpaired if the several colonies had remained 
separate from one another is an uncertain and 
profitless question. They did not remain separate. 
They adopted a federal constitution which con- 
tained a number of guarantees for the permanence 
of property right — some intentional, some probably 
accidental — which made it difficult for legislatures 
in subsequent generations to alter the legal condi- 
tions of the earlier period, except when such 
alterations secured the approval of the courts. 

I have spoken in the previous lecture of the cir- 
cumstances which led to the adoption of the Federal 
Constitution. During the war of the Revolu- 
tion, from 1775 to 1782 and in the years imme- 
diately thereafter, the American Union had been 
a league of independent states, and a very loose 
one. These states had formed an organization 
for mutual protection in carrying on a war against 
England. But this organization was very weak 
indeed. While the war lasted, the imminence of 
perils which threatened to involve all, and the 
personality of a few leaders, of whom George 
Washington was the most conspicuous, enabled the 



38 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

different colonies to act with some degree of 
coherence. "We must all hang together," said 
one of the signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, "or we shall all hang separately. ' ' But 
when independence was conceded by England in 
1782 and the restraints of common danger were 
removed, the hopeless inefficiency of the central 
government became obvious. From 1783 to 1789 
the United States had no means of securing concert 
of action at home or respect and influence abroad. 
Clear-headed men saw the absolute necessity of 
centralization. The members of the Constitutional 
Convention of 1787 felt these considerations very 
strongly. A large majority of them were men of 
substance; a considerable minority were men of 
wealth. They had viewed with apprehension the 
readiness of their fellow countrymen to issue paper 
money, to scale down debts, or to interpret the 
obligation of contract in such a manner as to 
render large investments of capital precarious. It 
was at once a matter of personal interest and of 
public interest to them to prevent this ; of personal 
interest because acts of this kind would impair 
their own enjoyment and success ; of public interest 
because it was vitally necessary to America to have 
its industry and commerce managed in the most 
efficient and far-sighted way. 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 39 

This fact is of itself sufficient to account for the 
general tone of the Constitution on matters of 
property right. But there are certain clauses in 
that instrument which have been even more 
effective in securing the property holders against 
adverse legislation than the Convention itself in- 
tended or expected. The reason for this is some- 
what curious. The whole document was the result 
of a series of compacts, agreements, and com- 
promises, between two pretty evenly balanced 
parties — a states rights party, which wished to 
limit the powers of the federal government, and a 
national party, which was anxious to set some 
practical control on the autonomy of the states. 
In meeting the wishes of these two parties and 
limiting the powers of both state and federal 
governments, the Convention more or less unwit- 
tingly* gave the property owners as a body certain 

* There has been a tendency in recent years to represent 
the makers of the Constitution as engaged in a deliberate 
attempt to tie the hands of legislators with regard to their 
future action in matters of property right. A study of 
the debates of the Constitutional Convention shows that a 
good deal of what they did in this way was accidental 
rather than deliberate. This is well illustrated by the 
history of the clause in Article I, section 10, which prohibits 1 
the passage, by any of the states, of laws impairing the ' 
obligation of contract. No such prohibition was suggested 
by the Convention to the Committee of Detail for its con- 
sideration, nor is there any trace of it in the final report 



40 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

guaranties against legislative interference of any- 
kind. 

It was in the first place provided that there 
should be no taking of private property without 
due process of law. The states rights men feared 
that the federal government might, under the stress 
of military necessity, pursue an arbitrary policy 
of confiscation. The federalists, or national party, 
feared that one or more of the states might pursue 
the same policy under the influence of sectional 
jealousy. To avoid this double danger both parties 
united on a constitutional provision which pre- 
vented the legislature or executive, either of the 
nation or of the individual states, from taking 
property without allowing judicial inquiry into 
the public necessity involved, and without making 
full compensation even in case the result of such 

made by that Committee. During the discussion of this 
report (which constitutes the basis of the Constitution as 
finally passed) the insertion of such a clause was suggested; 
but it was opposed by Mr. Gouverneur Morris and others 
as unwise, and was not pressed to a vote. What the 
Convention ultimately adopted- instead of this, was a motion 
to prohibit ''retrospective" laws. This at any rate was 
the entry in the journal, though there is some doubt whether 
it was transmitted in that shape to the committee of final 
revision, known as the Committee on Style. This committee 
seems to have taken the responsibility of changing the 
phraseology of this section on its own account; so that 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 41 

inquiry was favorable to the government; and it 
was further provided, by another equally impor- 
tant clause in the Constitution, that no state should 
pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts. 

No man foresaw what would be the subsequent 
effect of these provisions in preventing a majority 
of voters, acting in the legislature or through the 
executive, from disturbing existing arrangements 
with regard to railroad building or factory opera- 
tion until the railroad stockholders or factory 
owners had had the opportunity to have their case 
tried in the courts. Clauses which were at first 
intended to prevent sectional strife, and to protect 
the people of one locality against arbitrary legis- 
lation in another, became a means of strengthening 
vested rights as a whole against the possibility of 
legislative or executive interference. Nor was the 

when the whole instrument was last submitted to the Con- 
vention and rather hurriedly passed, the clause was made 
to read: ''any ex post facto law or law impairing the 
obligation of contract.'' A motion made by Elbridge 
Gerry to extend this prohibition to the Federal Government 
as well as to the states was not seconded. Indeed, the 
Convention at that stage of proceedings seems to have been 
not unnaturally impatient of further delay and anxious to 
pass anything which the Committee on Style recommended. 
The whole matter can be followed out in detail in Farrand 's 
Records of the Federal Convention, by the aid of his excel- 
lent index to the successive sections of the Constitution. 



42 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

direct effect of these clauses in preventing specific 
acts on the part of the legislature the most impor- 
tant result of their existence. They indirectly 
became a powerful means of establishing the 
American courts in the position which they now 
enjoy as arbiters between the legislature and the 
property owner. For whenever an act of the 
legislature violated, or even seemed to violate, one 
of these clauses, it came before the court for 
review; and in case the court found that such 
violation existed, the law was blocked — rendered 
powerless by a dictum of the judges declaring it 
unconstitutional. 

An Act of the British Parliament is authorita- 
tive. It is law, ipso facto, as soon as it is regularly 
passed. It cannot be resisted except by revolution. 
But an Act of the United States Congress or of 
a state legislature is not law except as it lies within 
the limits allowed by the Constitution. Whether 
it transgresses these limits is a matter for the courts 
to decide. Any restriction of property right by 
legislative act is therefore null and void unless the 
courts decide that due process of law has been 
followed and that no obligation of contract is 
impaired. 

The power thus granted to the courts to render 
acts of the legislature inoperative is perhaps the 



J 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 43 

most distinctive feature of the American Consti- 
tution; it is certainly the one which English 
publicists find it the most difficult to understand. 

The jurisprudence of England is founded on the 
theory that there must be in every country some 
sovereign, some designated person or body of 
persons whose deliberately expressed will must be 
obeyed. The older writers based this sovereignty 
upon a supposititious social contract. Hobbes, for 
instance, said that the evils of anarchy were so 
great that the people had entered into an agree- 
ment to obey a common superior who could main- 
tain order, and that, as long as the superior 
maintained order, the people were bound by their 
agreement. To philosophers of this school, the 
assumption of this compact, fictitious though it 
was, was the fundamental justification of state 
authority. 

Bentham and his followers rejected Hobbes* 
fiction of a social compact. Bentham said that the 
authority of the state rested, not on a fictitious 
agreement supposed to have been made by our 
remote ancestors, but on an actual, present-day 
fact that the people recognize a common superior 
and render him habitual obedience. It is the fact 
of obedience, not the fiction of a compact, that 
makes him sovereign. But Bentham insisted just 



44 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

as clearly as Hobbes did that there were no logical 
limits to the sovereign's power. There might be 
practical limits. Things might be so badly man- 
aged that continued obedience was intolerable. In 
that case we had a revolution, a temporary state 
of anarchy, followed by the acceptance of a new 
sovereign; but as long as there was any sovereign 
at all it was, in Bentham's view, absurd to talk 
of theoretical restraints upon the exercise of his 
power. 

The American view of sovereignty differs from 
that of Bentham in one or two important respects. 
The American constitutional lawyer holds that we 
habitually obey a common superior within certain 
limits. It recognizes that the authority of the state 
is based on the fact of habitual obedience on the 
part of its members. "A just government exists 
by consent of the governed. But that obedience, 
and that consent, which are accorded as long as 
government keeps within what we regard as the 
sphere of its authority, cease when it tries to go 
outside of that sphere." When the acts of the 
legislature or executive are kept within certain 
constitutional lines, and follow certain rules laid 
down by the public opinion, we obey the govern- 
ment. Within these bounds it is de facto sover- 
eign. When it transgresses those bounds, we do 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 45 

not obey it. If it attempts to extend its power 
beyond the limits which public opinion has fixed, 
its acts are nullified; — set at nought by the refusal 
of the public to cooperate in their enforcement. 
"We do not attempt to change the sovereign by a 
process of revolution; we leave him undisturbed 
within the domain of his traditional authority. 
But we refuse the active help which is necessary 
to enable him to extend that authority into an 
unauthorized domain. 

The doctrine of passive resistance has been 
treated with a good deal of unmerited ridicule. 
We are told that it is only another name for 
revolution; that if any body of men assumes to 
tell the sovereign that he cannot pass certain limits, 
they themselves are claiming sovereignty by that 
very act. This is not necessarily true. If a man 
prevents a policeman from doing something which 
lies outside of the limits of his office, he is not 
assuming sovereignty. He is not even trying to 
lessen the respect for the police. He is simply 
keeping the police authority within traditional 
bounds. Whether such acts do result in over- 
throwing the authority of the police is a matter 
for the historian to determine. The experience of 
the United States shows that very sharp limits 
can be set to the exercise of the authority of a 



46 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

governing body without in the least impairing its 
power and efficiency within those limits. 

It is sometimes argued that if the American 
courts can limit the powers of both national and 
state legislatures, the courts themselves are sover- 
eign. This appears to be a misleading use of 
language. The courts certainly do not claim or 
exercise the kind of sovereignty which is exercised 
by the English Parliament. It is a truer descrip- 
tion of the situation to say that America under the 
Constitution witnesses an actual exercise of divided 
sovereignty; that the people live under a con- 
current jurisdiction of state and nation, obeying 
each in some things; and that the authoritative 
position of the courts in determining the limits of 
this sovereignty is not itself a transcendent exercise 
of sovereign power, but a highly skilled exposition 
of public opinion — in other words, that the 
authority of American judges rests on the same 
sort of basis as the authority of English judges — 
on their power of interpretation of precedents and 
customs. 

The early history of the Supreme Court of the 
United States furnishes strong confirmation of this 
statement. While the clauses of the Constitution 
left the federal courts large duties and powers, 
their ability to fulfil those duties and to exercise 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 47 

those powers was not shown until a chief justice 
of the first rank — John Marshall — was by his 
almost unrivalled power of exposition able to enlist 
the opinion both of lawyers and of laymen in 
support of the judicial authority. It is to the work 
of judges like Marshall and Story and Kent 
that the actual position of the courts under the 
American Constitution is mainly due. 

But constitutional restraints of this kind, while 
they strengthened the position of the property 
holder in American politics, could not give him 
permanent security in case public opinion de- 
manded a change. For the Constitution itself can 
be amended, and will be amended, when there is 
a consensus of voters in different parts of the 
country in favor of amendment. Alteration of the 
Federal Constitution is a slower and more formal 
thing than alteration of the law, or than alteration 
of the constitution of any single state. But it 
comes when there is a demand for it. Why did 
not this demand make itself felt? Why did the 
intensely democratic America of the nineteenth 
century rest satisfied with constitutional provisions 
regarding property right which were devised by 
representatives of an aristocratic society in the 
eighteenth under circumstances which strengthened 
the hands of the conservatives ? 



48 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

The first cause for this persistence of property 
right is to be found in the land policy of the 
United States. We saw in the previous lecture 
how the method adopted in the disposal of the 
public lands promoted democracy. Side by side 
with this effect, and in curious contrast to it, was 
an equally marked effect in promoting industrial 
conservatism. 

The immigrant who settled in the western states 
was offered two things : the vote, and the chance 
of becoming a landowner. The fact that votes 
were bestowed so freely upon large bodies of 
settlers, many of whom were of alien race and 
traditions, caused serious apprehension in many 
quarters. Where so many of the individual 
settlers were personally reckless and uncontrolled 
by tradition, there was good reason to fear that 
they would organize their governments in a reck- 
less and untraditional fashion, and thus pave the 
way for the abuse of democratic power. These 
fears proved to be unfounded. The opportunity 
to own farms in freehold made ambitious settlers 
conservative. Men with a hundred and sixty 
acres of land were not likely to pass laws which 
would interfere with the rights of property, and 
particularly of landed property. The prospect of 
becoming landowners had the same sort of steady- 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 49 

ing effect upon men who framed the constitutions 
of new states in 1820 or 1830 that the fact of 
already being landowners had upon the men who 
framed the Federal Constitution forty years 
earlier. 

But Hamilton's policy of giving a home at a 
nominal price to every bona fide settler, though it 
was the most important single element in securing 
the rights of property against measures of legis- 
lative interference, was by no means the only 
influence of the kind. 

The immigrant found it easy to get land; he 
found it hard to get capital. Natural resources 
were present in abundance. The accumulated 
supplies of machinery, fuel, and food which enable 
man to utilize those natural resources effectively 
were conspicuous by their absence. Each addition 
to the capital of the community, however small, 
represented a large addition to its productiveness. 
The savings of the settlers and the investments of 
citizens who lived in other states contributed alike 
to this end. 

Under these circumstances there was a tendency 
to grant all possible privileges to those who had 
capital for investment and to free them from 
arbitrary restrictions of every kind. No community 
would enforce a usury law which limited the rate 



50 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

of interest to six per cent, when people who 
borrowed capital at eight or at ten per cent made 
large and legitimate profits over and above the 
interest rate. The dangers lay in the opposite 
direction. All through the period from 1830 to 
1860 the western states of the Union tended to 
encourage every sort of scheme which would 
attract capital or the semblance of capital, without 
much regard to its present or prospective sound- 
ness. Banking laws were so loosely and carelessly 
drawn that a board of directors could issue large 
amounts of notes upon small amounts of reserve. 
The bank notes, so long as they circulated from 
hand to hand, appeared to increase the working 
capital of the community; and any man who 
undertook to examine too closely the nature of 
the security that lay behind the note was regarded 
as an unpatriotic member of society, who in an 
excess of selfish over-caution questioned the validity 
of a bill which he might just as easily have passed 
on to the next man without inquiry.* Not until 

* I have been told on what appears to be good authority 
that the bank examiners of many of the western states in 
the years prior to 1857 always made their visits of inspec- 
tion in a certain order; so that a very small amount of gold 
reserve, by being passed from bank to bank at the opportune 
moment, could do duty in protecting a large number of 
separate note issues. And when I asked one of my inform- 



POSITION OF PEOPERTY OWNER 51 

the time of the Civil War, when the United States 
government needed to use the banks as a means 
in carrying out its own fiscal policies, was this 
state of things effectively remedied. 

Among many means employed by the states of 
the Union toward rapid development of their 
resources, the joint stock company or industrial 
corporation was most prominent. 

The incorporation acts of the colonies at the end 
of the eighteenth century were based almost 
entirely upon English models. The American law, 
like the English law of the same period, was 
reluctant to allow people to avail themselves of the 
principle of limited liability until there had been 
a special examination of the circumstances by some 
public authority. But as time went on this state 
of things changed rapidly. There were in America 
almost no large capitalists who could finance 
industrial enterprises on an extensive scale. To 

ants what would have happened to the bank if the bank 
examiner had deviated from the regular routine, I was told 
that he would probably have had to quit the country. It 
is at any rate quite probable that the consequences of a 
departure from the regular routine would have been as 
disastrous both to him and to the banks as those which we 
find when a teacher who has for a series of exercises called 
his class in alphabetical order suddenly departs from this 
practice without notice. 



52 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

build factories or canals it was necessary to get a 
large number of small investors united; and these 
investors could not safely plan to unite their for- 
tunes for the promotion of speculative enterprises 
unless limited liability was assured them as a 
matter of course. A few states, notably Massa- 
chusetts, held to the principles of the older 
English law. But Massachusetts, though better 
provided with capital than most other parts of 
the Union, found that this policy interfered with 
its development, and that states which had more 
liberal laws made more rapid progress in the 
introduction of the necessary improvements. 
Investors sought other localities for investment; 
the growth of Massachusetts business was hindered ; 
its character was not greatly improved. The 
ultimate result in Massachusetts, as in other states, 
was the passage of general laws under which any 
group of individuals could associate their capital 
for industrial enterprise and obtain the privileges 
of limited liability from the state. 

Some men were awake to the danger that might 
arise from the growth of corporations. Andrew 
Jackson was one of these men ; and his contest with 
the Bank of the United States is a well-known 
episode in American financial history. But such 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 53 

fears as Jackson's were exceptional.* Most people 
were too much, occupied with the necessity of 
getting capital for their several communities to 
trouble their minds very much about what might 
be done with the capital when it was once invested. 
There was far more tendency to help the corpora- 
tions by subsidies and special privileges than to 
limit them by laws whose immediate necessity was 
not very obvious. Charters were granted with the 
utmost freedom by almost every state in the Union ; 
and charter powers once given could not easily be 
restricted. 

The control of the government over corporations 
was weakened, and the rights and immunities 
of the property holders were correspondingly 
strengthened, by two developments of constitu- 
tional law whose effect upon the modern industrial 
situation may be fairly characterized as fortuitous. 
One of these was the decision in the celebrated 
Dartmouth College case in 1819 ; the other was the 
passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
Constitution of the United States in 1868. 

I call their effect fortuitous, because neither the 
judges who decided the Dartmouth College case 

* Even Jackson's quarrel with the Bank appears to have 
been based on personal grounds quite as much as on 
constitutional ones. 



54 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

nor the legislators wlio passed the Fourteenth 
Amendment had any idea how these things would 
affect the modern economic situation. The Dart- 
mouth College case dealt with an educational 
institution, not with an industrial enterprise. The 
Fourteenth Amendment was framed to protect the 
negroes from oppression by the whites, not to 
protect corporations from oppression by the legis- 
lature. It is doubtful whether a single one 
of the members of Congress who voted for it 
had any idea that it would touch the question 
of corporate regulation at all. Yet the two 
together have had the effect of placing the Ameri- 
can industrial corporation in a constitutional 
position of extraordinary vantage. 

In 1816 the New Hampshire legislature attempted 
to abrogate the charter of Dartmouth College. 
Daniel Webster was employed by the College in 
its defense. His reasoning so impressed the 
members of the court that they committed them- 
selves to the position that a charter was a contract ; 
that a state, having induced people to invest 
money by certain privileges and immunities, could 
not at will modify those privileges and immunities 
thus granted. Whether the court would have taken 
such broad ground if the matter had come before 
it thirty or forty years later, when the abuses of 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 55 

ill-judged industrial charters had become more 
fully manifest, is not sure ; / but having once 
adopted this view and maintained it in a series of 
decisions, the courts could not well abandon it. 
Inasmuch as many of the corporate charters 
granted by state legislatures had an unlimited 
period to run, the theory that these instruments 
were contracts binding the state for all time had 
a very important bearing in limiting the field 
within which a legislature could regulate the 
activity of such a body, or an executive interfere 
with it. 

Again, by the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
Federal Constitution the states were forbidden to 
interfere with the civil rights of any person or 
to pass discriminating laws which should treat 
different persons unequally. This amendment, 
passed just after the close of the Civil War, was 
intended simply to protect the negro; to prevent 
the southern states which were in the act of being 
readmitted to the Union from abridging the rights 
of the blacks. A number of years elapsed before 
the probable effect of this clause upon the consti- 
tutional position of industrial corporations seems 
to have been realized. But in 1882 the Southern 
Pacific Railroad Company, having been, as it 
conceived, unfairly taxed by the assessors of a 



56 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

certain county in California, took the position that 
a law of the state of California taxing the property 
of corporations at a different rate from that of 
individuals was in effect a violation of the Four- 
teenth Amendment to the Constitution, because a 
corporation was a person and therefore entitled to 
the same kind of treatment as any other person. 
This view, after careful consideration, was upheld 
by the federal courts. A corporation, therefore, 
under the law of the United States, is entitled to 
the same immunities as an individual; and since 
the charter creating it is a contract, whose terms 
cannot be altered at the will of the legis- 
lature which is a party thereto, its constitutional 
position as a propertj^ holder is much stronger in 
America than it is anywhere in Europe. 

This effect of the Fourteenth Amendment was 
all the more important because it came at a time 
when men's political conservatism had been a good 
deal unsettled by the incidental consequences of 
the Civil War. 

The dominant power of the large landholders of 
the South had been destroyed. These landholders 
had remained more essentially an aristocracy than 
any other social group in the United States; and 
like most aristocracies, they had been essentially 
conservative in all questions affecting property 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 57 

right. When a body of men like these, as con- 
spicuous for their political ability as had been the 
Roman landed aristocracy two thousand years 
earlier, was suddenly reduced from affluence to 
poverty, an important bulwark for the stability of 
property rights was taken away. 

The Civil War had accustomed people to the use 
of depreciated paper money, dependent for its 
value upon the order of the government making 
it a legal tender for the payment of debts. The 
over-issue of United States treasury notes, or 
greenbacks, had been so great that a dollar in 
paper in 1864 was worth less than half a dollar 
in gold. This had had a considerable effect on 
wages and prices in every line of industry. It 
had encouraged speculators to contract obligations 
recklessly because they hoped to pay them in a 
currency that would have become still further 
depreciated. In districts where such speculators 
were numerous the voters frequently urged their 
congressional representatives to oppose any attempt 
to restore specie payments after the war had come 
to an end. For twelve years after its close debtors 
and creditors contended against one another to 
secure action by the United States government 
regarding its treasury notes which should be favor- 
able to their several interests. After it became 



58 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

evident that no more paper would be issued, and 
that the government could and would accumulate 
a sufficient gold reserve to resume payment of its 
notes in 1879, the debtors joined with the silver 
mine owners to renew the coinage of the old silver 
dollar, which was now worth less than the gold 
dollar. The fact that the government was thus 
constantly importuned to legislate against one 
class of property owners for the benefit of another 
prepared the public for the more radical suggestion 
of legislation against property owners as a body, 
in the interest of those who had little or nothing. 

The tariff legislation in the years following the 
Civil War had a somewhat similar history. During 
the war all taxes had been high. There were heavy 
excise rates which the home producer had to pay. 
To give him some measure of protection the import 
duty on foreign products which came to the 
American market was made higher still. In the 
years immediately following the war the excise 
duties were abolished. The import duties, through 
a disagreement between the Senate and the House 
as to details, remained unchanged. The result was 
that many industries were given the benefit of 
extraordinarily high rates of protection which 
nobody had ever really intended to bestow. Some 
of the concerns called into being by this unwise 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 59 

policy were dependent upon its continuance for 
their very existence, while others more favorably 
situated, which could have maintained themselves 
with moderate duties or perhaps with no duties at 
all, were enabled to make extravagant profits for 
their stockholders. All this accustomed people to 
the idea that prosperity w^as dependent on Acts of 
Congress, rather than on the operation of intelli- 
gent self-interest, and paved the way for the 
advocate of more energetic state control over 
property holders as a body. 

Nevertheless, the tendency to rely on competition 
remained very strong. The American people had 
seen so much good that came from competition that 
it was inclined to trust it unduly, and to feel that 
where competition failed to protect the consumer 
or laborer special legislation to regulate industry 
would probably make matters worse instead of 
better. Where one corporation had a monopoly 
and abused it, it was thought that such monopoly 
and such abuse would be only temporary. It was 
confidently believed that unfair and exorbitant 
profits would invite a rival corporation into the 
field, so that rates would go down and abuses 
correct themselves. Even in matters like railway 
transportation, where monopoly was requisite in 
the interest both of public convenience and eco- 



60 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

nomical administration, people clung, in the face 
of adverse experience, to the hope that competition 
must somehow be made to act. 

Some of this irrational belief in competition 
existed in England;* but it was never quite so 
strong as in the United States, There had always 
been a great many lines of business in which Eng- 
land did not tolerate the imposition of competitive 
rates, while America accepted them as a matter of 
course. Contrast the attitude of the two countries 
in the matter of rentals for agricultural land. 
The English landowner who deprived an old 
tenant of possession because a new tenant was 
ready and able to pay a higher rental, forfeited 
social consideration. In America the landowner 
was subject to no such restriction. If he rented his 
land he was expected to get what he could. If he 

* The history of English railway legislation furnishes 
marked instances of this sort of opposition. From 1830 to 
1850 Parliamentary committees were constantly trying to 
arrange toll systems by which independent carriers could 
have their trains hauled by the railway company, and 
running powers under which different companies could 
compete with one another upon the same line of rails. 
The Eailway and Canal Traffic Act of 1854, though it was 
based on careful study and was in many respects a well- 
drawn measure, shows a most obstinate adherence to the 
belief that the competition of different carriers on the same 
line of rails must somehow be possible if the proper way 
of enforcing it could be discovered. 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 61 

sold it he was expected to sell it at the highest 
price obtainable. As long as he did not rent his 
property to people who would use it for immoral 
purposes, or sell it to notoriously undesirable 
citizens, the public would not condemn him for 
seeking the best market he could get. 

Again, contrast the conditions affecting the rate 
of wages in the two countries. In England labor 
was comparatively immobile. Migration from 
district to district was the exception, rapid change 
from one occupation to another a still rarer excep- 
tion. The consequence was that wages in most 
districts and in many occupations were to a large 
measure fixed by custom. Even in those industries 
where competitive wages might otherwise have been 
paid, the effect of the trades unions was to limit 
the output of the individual laborer, and therefore 
to prevent him from competing with his fellows; 
to substitute the principle of collective bargaining 
for that of competition. In America the case was 
wholly different. The mobility of the laborer was 
very great. He went where he could get the 
highest wages. If he was paid by the piece, as he 
generally preferred to be, he worked as hard as he 
could to increase his earnings. Other members of 
the community looked on with satisfaction, because 
he was doing all he could to increase productivity. 



62 UNDBRCUEEENTS IN POLITICS 

They were glad to have him do as much as he could. 
They wished to have him dispose of his labor in the 
best market. Under these circumstances competi- 
tive wages were not only paid and earned, but 
approved by society as a standard. 

This indicates the fundamental reason why 
competition was viewed with so much favor in the 
United States. It put a premium on economic 
efficiency. It tended to give the direction of indus- 
trial affairs to the men who could obtain the largest 
product with the smallest labor. This was vitally 
necessary for the United States in the first half 
of its history — more necessary, I believe, than to 
any European country. For the immediate prob- 
lems that lay before the United States at that time 
were predominantly industrial ones. We had a 
new country to develop. We had to attract 
capital by every possible means. We had to 
employ a moderate amount of labor and a very 
scanty amount of inherited wealth in industrial 
competition with the nations of Europe. This was 
for a long time the only line in which we could 
compete with them ; it was on our efficiency in this 
particular that we based our claim to national 
importance. We had no army or navy comparable 
with that of European states. Our public service, 
except in one or two departments, was rudimen- 



POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 63 

tary. Our work in literature and in science showed 
promise rather than performance. But in the 
intelligent conduct of industry and the develop- 
ment of inventions connected therewith, we had no 
rival but England. England had the advantage 
of accumulated capital and sound business tradi- 
tions ; America had the advantage of a competitive 
system that brought progressive men and methods 
to the front and thereby equalized the struggle. 
Small wonder that the patriotic American looked 
with favor on an institution that enabled him to 
hold his own in the industrial race. Small wonder 
that a republic predominantly composed of strong 
men should overlook the abuses of a system under 
which the weak members suffered, when it con- 
tributed so much to the standing of the nation 
as a whole. 



Ill 

EECENT TENDENCIES IN ECONOMICS 
AND IN LEGISLATION 

"We saw in the last lecture why the adoption of 
universal suffrage in the United States was not 
followed by a movement in the direction of 
socialism. Most of the voters expected to become 
property owners; this made them regard any 
restriction of the rights of property as undesirable. 
Nearly all of them believed that free competition 
would protect the community against extortion or 
abuse by the property owner; this made them 
regard such restriction as unnecessary. These 
were the sentiments and ideals which prevailed 
among the great body of the American people 
until the time of the Civil "War in 1861. 

The war did not weaken the belief in competition, 
nor lessen the desire of the average American to 
become a property owner; but it made people 
more ready to see the functions of government 
extended, and less conservatively tenacious of legal 
tradition. Under stress of military necessity the 
state and national authorities had indulged in a 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 65 

good deal of arbitrary interference with personal 
liberty and private property. People had become 
so used to this sort of conduct on the part of 
government officials that a great many things 
which would have been resented as usurpations at 
the beginning of the war were tolerated as ordinary 
incidents of life at the end of it. The class that 
would have been most inclined to resent such 
usurpation — the large landowners of the South — 
had been reduced from affluence to poverty. 
While the conservative planters had been losing 
their money, and with it a good deal of their 
political power, enterprising and often reckless 
speculators had fallen heir to their wealth and 
influence. 

When matters were in this condition a large 
section of the community found its faith in com- 
petition somewhat rudely shaken by what is known 
as the Granger movement. 

No states had done as much to attract outside 
capital in the years preceding the Civil War as 
those of the upper Mississippi valley. Land was 
fertile, labor was efficient; opportunities for pro- 
ductive industry of every kind were abundant. 
The only disadvantages under which the region 
suffered were lack of capital and remoteness from 
market; and the people strove to overcome these 



66 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

disadvantages by borrowing money and building 
railroads with the utmost rapidity. Grants of 
public domain were offered on a large scale to any 
group of capitalists that would build a new line. 
''Each community wanted railroads at any price. 
Each railroad offered glowing inducements to 
settlers. The result was that railroads and settlers 
both moved too far west, and ran heavily in debt 
to do it." 

In England and in some of the older parts of 
the United States railroads were built to accom- 
modate traffic already existing. Cities were already 
there. Markets were already there. The people 
had had means of trading with one another before 
the railroad came. The railroad merely facilitated 
the process of exchange and increased the growth 
and prosperity of the community. But in the 
newer parts of America the railroads were built to 
create traffic. Men went west to occupy land that 
the railroads had made accessible. They had 
frequently borrowed money to improve that land. 
Unless they shipped their grain to market by rail 
they had no power to sell their products or pay 
interest on their loans. If the price of wheat in 
the markets of Europe or the Atlantic seaboard 
was high, the railroad could charge rates that 
would pay interest on its bonded indebtedness and 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 67 

leave the farmer enough to meet his obligations 
also ; but if for any reason the price fell, one or the 
other must go to the wall. If the railroad kept its 
rates high the farmers suffered. If it reduced its 
rates its own security holders suffered. 

This was the dilemma which the communities in 
the upper Mississippi valleys faced in 1869 and 
1870. Up to that time the European demand for 
grain had been so large that prices were well 
maintained in spite of the increased American 
wheat acreage. When prices fell railroad rates 
were reduced to a very low figure at competitive 
points; but they were kept at a high figure at 
intermediate points, where the shipper had but a 
single railroad to deal with and was forced to use 
that or see his grain go to waste. Free competition 
helped the city but not the country. 

The railroads claimed that it was necessary for 
them to make their local rates high; that if they 
did not they would have to go out of business. 
The farmer was by no means satisfied with this 
answer. He thought that if the railroads could 
afford to do business cheaply for the city they 
could afford to do it cheaply for the country; and 
in any event he needed to pay his interest as much 
as they needed to pay theirs. In the years from 
1869 to 1877 the farmers' organizations, or granges, 



68 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

insisted that their representatives in the legislature 
should compel railroads to make cheap rates for 
country districts.* 

How could this result best be accomplished? 
This was the question on which there was no con- 
sensus of opinion. The radicals favored govern- 
ment ownership of railroads as the best solution 
of the problem. But the civil service of the United 
States in 1870 was in such bad condition that very 
few men, whatever their prepossessions in favor of 
government ownership as a theory, believed that 
the United States was in a position to put that 
theory into effect. Public office was regarded as a 
reward for partisan activity. Efficient men were 
turned out of their places in order to make room for 
less efficient candidates who had rendered political 

* This organized attempt to control railroad rates by- 
representatives of farmers' organizations is shown as the 
Granger movement. It is noteworthy as having aroused 
the attention of the American people to the fact that there 
was a railroad problem which free competition would not 
solve; and as having been the first considerable attempt to 
use representative government as a means of limiting the 
power of property owners to manage their business in their 
own way. Strictly speaking, it was not an attempt to 
attack the rights or interests of property owners as a class. 
It was an attempt to limit the rights of one set of property 
owners, the railroad security holders, in favor of another 
set of property owners, the farmers of the Mississippi 
valley. 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 69 

services, sometimes of a very questionable charac- 
ter, to help the dominant party to triumph at the 
preceding election. It was proverbial that it cost 
the government two or three times as much as it 
cost a private individual to get any piece of 
work done, and that when the work was done it 
was not well cared for or efficiently managed. 
To entrust an agency like the railroad, on which 
the industrial life of the country depended, to 
such unfit hands as those of the United States 
officeholders in 1870, was to say the least a 
dangerous experiment. 

Reformers who were not quite so radical advo- 
cated laws prescribing the rates which railroads 
could charge — the tariff itself being usually ar- 
ranged by a special commission appointed for the 
purpose. Such laws were in fact passed and such 
commissions appointed in a large number of states. 
The most thoroughgoing experiments of this kind 
were made in the upper Mississippi valley. The 
commissions usually took the rates which railroads 
charged at competitive points as a standard of 
what the railroads could afford, and then reduced 
the rates at intermediate points to a corresponding 
figure per mile. The railroads protested that this 
was confiscation ; that an equal mileage system was 
wholly inapplicable to railroad business; that the 



70 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

rates at competitive points did not pay a fair 
share of the fixed charges ; and that the application 
of this standard to other parts of the system would 
reduce them to bankruptcy. The courts, however, 
upheld the right of the commissions to prescribe 
railroad tariffs; quoting the words of Lord Hale 
Be Portihus Maris to the effect that when any 
business was in fact a monopoly the state had the 
right and duty to fix prices, and holding that the 
capitalists had invested their money subject to 
this disability. 

This was regarded as a heavy blow to the security 
owners. It apparently deprived them of their one 
safeguard against reckless legislation. But a more 
powerful force than that of the courts was working 
to protect the investor. As soon as the capitalists 
found that certain states would not allow them 
to earn interest on railroad investments they 
refused to invest more money in those states. No 
new roads were constructed; the equipment that 
wore out was not replaced. The rates at which 
wheat was carried to market remained low; but a 
great deal of wheat did not get carried to market 
at all, because the physical means to transport it 
were lacking. The legislatures could prevent high 
charges, but they could not prevent deficient ser- 
vice; and deficient service was a worse evil than 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 71 

high charges. Under these circumstances the 
farmers found themselves compelled to allow the 
railroads fair profits. The very men who had been 
most active in passing rate laws from 1870 to 1874 
were readiest to repeal them in 1878. 

While these experiments were being tried in the 
"West, another and more permanent solution was 
devised in the East by far-sighted railroad men 
like Albert Fink and publicists like Charles 
Francis Adams. These men pointed out that 
while the temporary interests of investors and 
shippers were often different, the permanent 
interests were very nearly or quite the same. 
They believed that the American law should 
be more nearly modeled on that of England; 
providing for publicity of accounts and rates, 
forbidding preferences of every kind, and directing 
the railroads, in consultation with state railway 
commissioners, to prepare tariffs by which the 
permanent interests of the investors and of the 
shippers should both be secured. On the whole, 
the states that adopted this plan, which was known 
as the Massachusetts system, got better railroad 
service and dealt with railroad abuses more effect- 
ively than those which tried to prescribe tariffs 
of charges. When the first national measure of 
railroad regulation, or interstate commerce law, 



72 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

was passed in 1887, it was inspired mainly by the 
Massachusetts idea. Although the Act was the 
result of a compromise, its general tenor was 
conservative rather than radical. 

But about this time people discovered that there 
were other industries besides railroads in which 
competition did not operate. The telegraph ser- 
vices of the country were being consolidated and 
monopolized as completely as the railroad service. 
The same thing was true of the telephone, of 
electric light and power, and of the gas and water 
supply of various cities whenever these were 
controlled by private corporations. Nor was this 
condition confined to the so-called "public utili- 
ties." The system of monopoly had extended 
itself to productive enterprise of almost every 
kind. The storage and refining of petroleum was 
centralized in the hands of the Standard Oil 
Company. Other industries were controlled and 
monopolized by corporations less widely known to 
the public but not less effective and often much 
more arbitrary in their action. No longer could 
we regard the railroad as an exception to a general 
law, to be dealt with by exceptional means. The 
very existence of the competitive system of industry 
was threatened. The question seemed to be not 
whether competition could be made to work uni- 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 73 

versally, but whether it could be made to work 
at all. 

With regard to public services like gas or water 
or telephone communication, people quickly ac- 
cepted the idea that they must almost necessarily 
be monopolies, and took measures accordingly. 
The existence of two rival gas or water companies 
obviously involved unnecessary expense on account 
of the duplication of pipes. The maintenance of 
two rival telephone companies caused less obvious 
but more burdensome expense, because everybody 
had to pay subscriptions to two different exchanges 
and had the added inconvenience of looking up 
addresses in two different books. 

Having once squarely recognized the impossi- 
bility of enforcing competition in these lines, the 
problem of control was comparatively simple. The 
various states frankly admitted that monopoly was 
inevitable, and appointed public utilities commis- 
sions with power to fix rates which should be fair 
both to investor and to consumer. But it was 
difficult to deal with the ordinary forms of pro- 
ductive industry in this way. It would have been 
impossible to select a commission sufficiently intel- 
ligent in its judgment and encyclopaedic in its 
knowledge to fix the prices of all sorts of market- 
able commodities. Nor did the public wish to have 



74 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

things managed in this fashion. Whatever might 
happen with railroads or telephones, people wanted 
factories and stores to be competitive. 

Contracts in restraint of trade and other arrange- 
ments to prevent competition have always been 
treated by the common law as against public policy 
and therefore, unenforceable. But many of the 
states of the Union went farther than this, and 
made such combinations misdemeanors and pun- 
ished them accordingly. In the year 1890 Congress 
passed a federal law of this kind, commonly known 
as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared 
illegal and criminal, punishable by fine or impris- 
onment or both, every contract or combination, in 
the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in 
restraint of trade and commerce among the several 
states or with foreign nations, and any monopo- 
lizing or attempt to monopolize any part of trade 
or commerce among the states. 

It is a little difficult to know just how the framers 
of the Act of 1890 expected it to be carried out. 
It was explicitly stated during the debates in 
Congress which preceded its passage that it was 
not intended to apply to railroads, for these were 
already regulated by the Act of 1887 under the 
reserved police power of the state. Probably half 
of those who voted for the Sherman Act supposed 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 75 

that it would remain a dead letter — like the man 
who, when asked for his views on prohibition, said 
that he was in favor of the law and against its 
enforcement. The Republicans were in power at 
the time, and the Republicans were friendly rather 
than hostile to organized capital. But the Republi- 
can party managers were frightened by the public 
indignation against monopolies, and thought that 
they could save the next presidential election by 
the passage of a rather sweeping law which they 
were confident that their friends could evade if 
they wished to. 

They did not succeed in carrying the election; 
but when the Democrats came into power in 1893 
the law still remained unenforced. Other issues 
occupied the public mind — tariff reduction, the 
currency, relation to European powers. Curiously 
enough, the first important cases decided under 
the Sherman Act dealt with railroads, to which 
its framers had not intended it to apply. In spite 
of the presence of the law upon the statute books, 
the years from 1898 to 1901, which marked the 
recovery of business after the long depression that 
had preceded it, witnessed a development of 
combinations of producers which for number, 
variety, and over-capitalization far surpassed any- 
thing which America had previously experienced. 



76 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

For a time it seemed as though nothing would 
be done to restrict the power of these combinations. 
The years named constituted a time of general 
prosperity and of advancing wages. No one — 
manufacturer, farmer, or workman — ^was inclined 
to quarrel very seriously with a system which 
appeared to contribute to his own prosperity. But 
with the advent of a period of trade depression in 
1903 people at once assumed a more critical atti- 
tude toward combinations of capital; and they 
have continued to maintain that attitude down to 
the present time. During the last decade the 
United States has witnessed a movement in the 
direction of state socialism which, though less 
thoroughgoing than the corresponding movements 
in Germany or France or even England, is never- 
theless very different in character from anything 
which occurred in the century preceding. 

The reasons why no such movement developed 
in the nineteenth century were explained in the 
previous lecture. They may be summed up in a 
single sentence. Where every man of energy and 
enterprise expected to become a property owner, 
the community was not inclined to favor legislation 
that restricted the rights of property. Of course 
there were exceptions, and numerous ones. All 
through the later years of the century there was 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 77 

a strong humanitarian movement in favor of 
protection to the weak. There was a growing 
sentiment, which found expression in state laws, 
that children must be kept out of factories until 
a reasonable age; that hours of labor, particularly 
for women and minors, must be duly regulated; 
that unsanitary or unsafe modes of doing business 
must be stopped; and that the crowding of popu- 
lation in the tenements of our large cities must be 
regulated as effectively as possible. Permanent 
labor commissions, to devise and enforce such 
legislation, were organized in a large number of 
the states of the Union; and a national Depart- 
ment of Labor with the same ends in view was 
established in 1888. 

Side by side with this humanitarian movement 
among property holders there had been an increas- 
ing amount of agitation for government control 
of industry among the workmen themselves. With 
the development of immigration from eastern 
Europe there was a growing proportion of laborers 
in the United States who did not understand or 
appreciate the individualistic traditions of an 
earlier generation and had neither the expectation 
nor the ambition to become property owners and 
take their places in the ranks of the capitalist 
class. As the public land of the United States was 



78 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 

used up, the opportunity of securing a freehold 
grew less attractive. As manufacturing establish- 
ments increased in size, the prospect of reaching 
the headship of such an establishment and becom- 
ing an independent employer of labor grew more 
remote. Under these circumstances a kind of 
antagonism of classes grew up in the latter part 
of the nineteenth century which had not been 
possible a generation or two earlier. Many active 
and intelligent workmen preferred to take their 
chances of becoming leaders of their own class in 
a struggle against the capitalist, instead of trying 
to pass from the ranks of the laborers to those of 
the employers. 

But this growth of class antagonisms, though it 
increased the dangers of industrial conflict, did 
not of itself produce any constructive changes in 
the social order. The Knights of Labor were able 
to organize strikes and boycotts on a large scale 
in 1885, and again in 1893. They were able to 
secure the passage of arbitration laws in various 
states, culminating in the Federal Act of the year 
1898. But they were not able, either alone or in 
conjunction with the leaders of the humanitarian 
movement, to carry the country with them in any 
organized effort to overthrow the competitive 
system or seriously impair its dominance. The 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 79 

efforts of the laborers as a class to secure their 
rights, or what they deemed to be their rights, 
aroused antagonism in other equally important 
classes of the community, particularly among the 
small farmers. What modern sociologists call the 
creation of class consciousness has done more harm 
than good to the labor movement in the United 
States. To accomplish their ends laboring classes 
must work with other classes, not against them. 
The attempt of the Knights of Labor to boycott 
everybody that did not obey the dictates of their 
organization resulted after two years in a virtual 
boycott of the Knights of Labor by the community. 
The employment of foreign socialistic literature to 
excite workmen against the traditional laws and 
institutions of America has on the whole done 
much more harm to those who used it than to those 
whom it was intended to injure. Affiliations 
between the more radical wing of the American 
labor leaders and the International "Workers of the 
World have been a source of weakness to the labor 
movement rather than of strength. 

The most serious mistake of the American labor 
leaders of the nineteenth century, from the stand- 
point of practical politics, was that they ignored 
and antagonized the farmers. 

In the year 1879 Henry George published his 



80 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

remarkable book on Progress and Poverty, which 
attracted wide attention not only in America but 
throughout the whole civilized world. It was 
brilliantly written; it had great loftiness of pur- 
pose. It promised the country deliverance from 
the worst economic evils under which it labored. 
Its sales ran up into the hundreds of thousands. 
While its conclusions were not accepted by the 
thoroughgoing socialists, brought up in the school 
of Marx, they were popular with nearly all Ameri- 
can workmen who were actively engaged in labor 
agitation. It was George's fundamental principle 
that all necessary reforms could be secured by 
taxing the unearned increment of land to its full 
amount. This conclusion was for obvious reasons 
exceedingly unpopular with landowners of every 
kind; with the small farmer or the owner of a 
little home no less than with the large proprietor. 
The fact that the labor party committed itself so 
generally to an endorsement of Henry George's 
views made it impossible for that party to be 
successful in a democracy where a great number 
of the voters lived on land which they owned or 
hoped to own. 

A quarter of a century later all this had changed. 
In 1903 the main attacks of the labor men were 
no longer directed against land ownership, but 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 81 

against organized capital. The alignment of 
parties was therefore qnite different. The smaller 
landed proprietors, in the city and in the country, 
had changed sides. The owners of farms and 
homes did not regard the attempts to control large 
combinations of capital as attacks upon themselves, 
but rather as measures conducive to their interest. 

Two main causes had combined to produce this 
attitude of hostility on the part of the farmers 
toward the organizations of capital. In the first 
place, the farmers believed that combinations of 
capitalists, by suppressing competition, were en- 
abled to charge more for their goods than they 
otherwise would have received, and that the men 
who bought goods from the manufacturers or 
services from the transportation agencies were by 
this means unfairly taxed ; and in the second place 
they felt a strong and somewhat unreasoning 
jealousy of the ''money power" which was behind 
these organizations. 

Prices of all goods and services had risen very 
rapidly in the years from 1899 to 1903. The profits 
of industrial monopolies during the same period 
had also been very large. It was therefore natural 
that the buyers should attribute the increase of 
price to the existence of monopoly, and should 
regard the profit as having been obtained mainly 



82 UNDERCUREENTS IN POLITICS 

by unfair measures of extortion from the public 
which competition would have prevented. As a 
matter of fact, this view was only partly correct. 
The period from 1899 to 1903 was one when prices 
rose in nearly all industries, whether monopolized 
or competitive. This was a necessary result of the 
increase in gold production in the closing years 
of the nineteenth century, followed by the sudden 
expansion of banking credits at the beginning of 
the twentieth. Every man who was engaged in 
the production of goods or services which took 
time — every one, in short, who had invested capital 
at the beginning of this period to get returns at 
the end of it — got more than a normal rate of 
profit, because currency conditions enabled him to 
sell his goods at higher prices than anybody 
expected. The prosperity of the large corporations 
was partly due to this cause; it was partly due to 
economies of method and organization which they 
were able to effect as a result of their combination ; 
and it was partly also due to their power to fix 
prices without fear of competition on a large scale. 
But it was natural enough that this last element 
had exaggerated importance in the public mind. 
People saw that the cost of living had greatly 
increased; they saw that many articles which had 
been sold at low prices under competition in 1899 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 83 

were sold at high prices under combination in 1903 ; 
and they naturally thought that the difference was 
due to the suppression of competition. 

Even more potent than their dislike for high 
prices was their jealousy of the money power 
which was supposed to be behind these combina- 
tions. The South and West have an inherent 
distrust of New York. They believe that the 
financial institutions in and around Wall Street 
exercise a baleful influence upon the business of 
the country as a whole.* I shall not try to discuss 
how far there was any real antagonism of interests 
between the West and the East in these matters. 
There was at any rate a feeling of antagonism; 
and many things happened to accentuate that 
feeling in the opening years of the twentieth 
century. 

Chief among these was the development of inter- 
locking directorates. In combining the manufac- 
turing and transportation interests of the country 
on a large scale, the banks of New York and other 
eastern cities were extremely active. Sometimes 
the bankers themselves took the initiative; some- 

* ' ' If a man finds a discrepancy between the face value 
of a share of stock and the amount actually paid in by the 
subscriber," said a prominent and high-minded New York 
banker, ''the West at once believes that the difference was 
stolen, and probably in Wall Street ! ' ' 



84 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

times the manufacturers who wanted to make a 
combination went to the bankers to secure their 
help. But in either case the financiers of New 
York and Boston and other eastern cities were 
active agents in the work of combination and the 
exchange of securities incident thereto. As a con- 
sequence the banks had a large representation in 
the directorates of the new concerns. The same 
man might be a director of twenty, fifty, or even 
a hundred large combinations; not because he was 
familiar with their work from the operating side, 
but because he could give them financial strength 
and support. Under these circumstances the people 
who were not included in such combinations — the 
small farmer, the salaried official, the wage- 
earner — assumed that all these great enterprises 
were managed from one common center, and that 
the purpose that controlled their management was 
gain for the financial world at the expense of the 
industrial one. 

These views were reflected in the public press. 
Journals of every kind — daily, weekly, and 
monthly — published articles which stimulated this 
suspicion by fair means and foul. Gradually the 
people came to believe that there was an alliance 
between the money power in Wall Street and the 
conservative element in the halls of Congress. 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 85 

There were plausible grounds for this belief. 
There has always been a certain amount of unwise 
congressional legislation in behalf of various indus- 
trial enterprises, and a great deal of improper 
employment of lobbyists to secure such ends. All 
this was made the subject of attack; and it was a 
kind of attack that was peculiarly effective. "When 
President Cleveland in 1888 tried to show the 
farmer that the high protective tariff injured the 
economic interests of the country, the farmers did 
not listen to his arguments. But when it was 
suggested twenty years later that the tariff had 
been devised in the interest of a money power 
which the farmer hated, the suggestion at once 
found ready credence. 

Dislike of high prices and jealousy of the money 
power thus combined to put the small property 
owners on the side of those who had no property, 
rather than on the side of those who had large 
property. It was in this respect that the indus- 
trial movements of 1903 differed from those of 
1883 or 1873. In the year 1873 the farmers were 
agitating for state control, but the laborers were 
not. In the year 1883 the laborers were agitating 
for state control, but the farmers were not. The 
year 1903 for the first time saw these two large 
elements ranged on the same side. 



86 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

The effect of this has been seen both in the law 
and in the politics of the country. The decade 
from 1903 to 1913 has witnessed the passage of a 
number of measures which twenty years ago would 
have been regarded as distinctly socialistic in tenor. 
Where state control already existed it has been 
made more strict. The Interstate Commerce Law 
of 1887 was supplemented by the Elkins Act of 
1903, the Hepburn Act of 1906, and the Mann 
Act of 1910. These measures had the support of 
conservatives who saw the necessity of bowing to 
public opinion, as well as of progressives who had 
helped to create that opinion. Nor was the atten- 
tion of Congress confined to rate regulation. A 
Department of Commerce and Labor was estab- 
lished in 1903, with powers much wider than those 
of the old Labor Bureau. A federal Employers' 
Liability Act was passed in 1906. An Hours of 
Service Act went into effect in 1907. And mean- 
time the experiments of individual states in these 
matters went far beyond what was done by 
federal authority. 

But of even more consequence than the passing 
of new laws was the increased activity shown in 
enforcing old laws. By the mere action of public 
sentiment the Department of Commerce and Labor 
in the Federal Government was given an impor- 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 87 

tance which its sponsors hardly anticipated. By 
the same force of public opinion, statutes which 
at first had been little more than dead letters were 
brought into active use as agencies of industrial 
control. When the federal arbitration Act of 1898 
was originally passed it was regarded both by its 
advocates and by its opponents as a thing of slight 
consequence — a piece of machinery which could be 
invoked only in occasional instances. Today public 
opinion virtually compels railroad corporations 
doing interstate business to submit their disputes 
to federal arbitration. Of still greater significance 
is the history of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 
1890. In the first twelve years during which this 
law was on the statute books, only two or three 
decisions adverse to industrial combinations were 
rendered, and these were not of great importance. 
But in the years following 1903 prosecutions and 
decisions under the Sherman Act followed one 
another in rapid succession. A climax, though 
not an end, was reached in 1911, when the United 
States Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of 
two of the largest and strongest industrial 
combinations in the country — the Standard Oil 
Company and the American Tobacco Company. 
Nor was this movement confined to industrial 
combinations. Eailroad companies were made to 



88 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

feel the effect of the new policy and the disposition 
of the Supreme Court to extend its application to 
an increasing range of cases; a disposition which 
reflected the progress of public opinion in the 
country as a whole.*' 

While all political parties in the United States 
claimed credit for the principles of the Sherman 
Act and professed a wish to enforce it, the Demo- 
cratic party was most consistently active in this 
direction; and the triumph of the Democrats at 
the presidential election of 1912, whatever may 
have been the other causes which contributed 
thereto, represented a victory for those who 
desired a rigid enforcement of the laws against 
organized capital and a return to a system of 
smaller industrial units. 

But though the action of legislatures and courts 
during recent years has been satisfactory to the 
public from a political standpoint, it has not been 
so from an economic one. The dissolution of large 
companies has not been followed by a reduction 
in charges. On the contrary, it has been attended 
in many instances by an increase. This increase 
is partly due to the general rise of wages through- 

* The student of American constitutional history will find 
this progress set forth in detail in F. N. Judson, The Law 
of Interstate Commerce. 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 89 

out tlie country ; partly to the increased cost of the 
methods of doing business imposed by recent Acts 
of Congress and of the several states; and partly 
also to the fact that the work of separate concerns 
is in many respects less economical than that of a 
large combination. Manufacturers who have been 
forced to dissolve their combinations have raised 
their prices in order to cover this increased cost. 
Whatever good enforced competition may have 
done, it has not brought the expected reduction in 
the expense of living. Dissolution appears to have 
hurt the consumers more than the investors. 

With railroads the case has been different. 
When railroad expenses are increased either by 
wage arbitrations or by new governmental require- 
ments, the companies are not allowed to raise their 
charges in order to meet the loss unless the Inter- 
state Commerce Commission gives its consent ; and 
this at best involves prolonged delay. The financial 
results to the railroads arising from their inability 
to raise rates have already been very grave, and 
the results to the public are beginning to be 
equally bad. Not only has there been loss of 
dividends and interest, but there has been decided 
reduction in quality of service, diminished demand 
for iron and steel products, and widespread dis- 



90 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

tress among large numbers of men thrown out of 
work in transportation and allied industries. 

This state of things seems likely to grow worse 
instead of better in the immediate future.* It has 
become clear that the enforced reintroduction of 
competition by authority of the government does 
not do for the public in the way of service, economy, 
and rapid investment of capital what the old- 
fashioned automatic competition did for our 
fathers. In order to get adequate service and low 
rates, inducement must be afforded for added 
investments of capital. This inducement does not 
exist today, and the country is suffering from the 
consequences. The immediate future will un- 
doubtedly see a reaction. There will be a move- 
ment either in the direction of greater freedom 
to the capitalist or of more intelligent supervision 
on the part of the government. The conservative 
wing of the Republican party hopes for the former ; 
the progressive wing desires the latter. 

In a rather remarkable passage of the Politics 
Aristotle says that the permanence of a common- 
wealth or organized body of citizens requires the 
reconciliation of two somewhat inconsistent aims. 
The laws must correspond to the wishes and the 

* I leave this sentence as it was uttered in May, 1914. 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 91 

judgment of the great body of freemen; the con- 
duct of the business of the nation must be in the 
hands of men who are more skilled than the great 
body of freemen can be, and who will probably 
do things for the community as a whole which are 
not understood or approved at the time. 

During the first century of the American 
republic the first of these results was secured, at 
the sacrifice of the second. The means on which 
the framers of the Constitution relied in order to 
obtain expert conduct of public affairs — the system 
of indirect election, for instance — proved futile for 
the purpose. During the greater part of the nine- 
teenth century the only way to secure skilful man- 
agement of public business was to keep it out of 
the hands of the government and put it into the 
hands of the property holder. Many things which 
European nations did through government agencies 
were left undone in America. Many other things 
were left to private capital. 

As long as there was even a semblance of free 
competition, the American nation as a whole was 
well content to have most of its business done by 
private capital because in that way it could be done 
efficiently and progressively, while under the exist- 
ing conditions of the American civil service 
government management would have meant waste 



92 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

and stagnation. Now that competition is found 
to be impossible in many of the important lines 
of business, the public is not so well content to 
leave things in private hands and is willing to 
experiment with state control, even at some sacrifice 
of efficiency. But our experiments in this line are 
proving very costly; more costly than the general 
public even yet appreciates. The solution of the 
problem will not be reached until the public 
demand for state control of industry and for 
trained civil service go hand in hand. 

America must learn the overwhelming cost to 
the consumer and the public of inexpert control. 
We have made some progress in that direction since 
1870 ; but we are far from having reached the point 
which a great nation needs to attain. Outside of 
the army, the navy, and the judiciary, the standard 
of administrative intelligence in America is lower 
than it is in Europe, and the public appreciation 
of the need of administrative intelligence a great 
deal lower. High positions in the public service, in 
spite of many honorable exceptions, are still given 
as political rewards. High positions in private or 
corporate business, with some dishonorable excep- 
tions, are still given as rewards for efficiency. 
Until these conditions are altered and the public 
appreciates expert work in the offices of state, 



ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 93 

industrial control in the United States is likely 
to remain in the hands of the property owner, on 
such terms as will give adequate inducement for 
the saving of capital and adequate guarantees for 
its intelligent use. 



POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW 



IV 
THE GEOWTH OF PARTY MACHINERY 

It is the intent of every nation, whatever its 
form of government, to have that government 
administered in the public interest. It is the per- 
petual danger of every governing body — monarchy, 
aristocracy, or democracy — that its powers will be 
used, not for the public interest but for the 
interests of certain individuals or classes. 

Each form of government is liable to its own 
peculiar perversion. A true monarchy is a govern- 
ment by a king for the benefit of the people. When 
he governs for the benefit of himself and his friends, 
he perverts monarchy into tyranny. A true 
aristocracy is a government by the wealthy and 
intelligent classes for the benefit of the people. 
When they begin to govern for their own benefit 
they pervert aristocracy into oligarchy. A true 
democracy is a government by the whole body of 
citizens for the benefit of the people. When for 
any reason whatever they pursue some less complete 
or more shortsighted end, they pervert democracy 
into demagogy. These dangers are as serious today 



98 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

as they were when Aristotle called attention to 
them two thousand years ago. 

It was for the purpose of avoiding these dangers 
that many publicists recommended a sharp sepa- 
ration of the executive, legislative, and judicial 
departments of the government. If one group of 
men controlled public business, another made the 
laws, and a third supervised their administration, 
it seemed unlikely that any one of the three groups 
could manage the affairs of state for its own selfish 
purposes. This division of the powers of govern- 
ment, with the resulting system of ''checks and 
balances," was a favorite device of English states- 
men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
It was warmly commended by Montesquieu, It 
found expression in American colonial charters. 
It was carried out quite fully in the Constitution 
of the United States. The framers of that instru- 
ment hoped that these checks and balances would 
prevent the use of the powers of government in 
behalf of any single dominant politician or group 
of politicians. 

To a large extent they were successful. They 
created a government, strong enough to do the 
work required of it at home and abroad, which has 
lasted for a century and a quarter without becom- 
ing either a tyranny, an oligarchy, or a demagogy. 



PAETY MACHINERY 99 

They enabled us to avoid the charted rocks and 
shoals on which other ships of state have been 
wrecked. But there was an uncharted shoal that 
they did not avoid — a form of perversion of 
popular government of which they knew nothing, 
and which has been a serious and increasing 
menace to our institutions. This is the perversion 
of party. 

The word "party" has two quite distinct 
meanings. It may be an organization whose 
primary object is to promote certain measures and 
policies, and which seeks to place its members in 
office as a means to that end; or it may be one 
whose primary purpose is to secure office for its 
leaders and rewards for their followers, valuing 
measures and policies according to their utility 
in promoting that result. The former represents 
the legitimate function and use of party ; the latter, 
its terribly frequent perversion. 

Writers like Elihu Root or Abbott Lawrence 
Lowell habitually think of parties in the first of 
these two senses. According to Mr. Root, the 
essential thing which the party system does is to 
organize public opinion so that the important 
issues can be squarely presented to the citizens at 
successive elections. The casting of a vote is but 
the last and often the least important part of the 



100 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

citizen's political activity. If each man went to 
the polls on election day to vote for the candidates 
he regarded as best or for the measures that he 
deemed most important, the votes would be so 
scattered that nothing could be done. Preliminary 
organization is needed to make this vote effective; 
to determine what measures interest a large part 
of the citizens instead of a small part, and what 
men will command confidence as advocates of those 
measures. It is by their influence within such 
parties in helping to make up the statements of 
principle, even more than by their vote at elections 
in determining which party is to prevail, that 
intelligent men contribute to the work of demo- 
cratic government. This view of Mr. Root has 
been illustrated and in some respects supple- 
mented by the pregnant phrase of President 
Lowell in which he compares politicians with 
brokers. "The process of forming public opinion 
involves bringing men together in masses on some 
middle ground where they can combine to carry 
out a common policy. In short, it requires a species 
of brokerage, and one of the functions of politicians 
is that of brokers. Perhaps it is their most 
universal function in a democracy." 

But the actual party organizations as we see 
them at the present day seldom conform fully 



PARTY MACHINERY 101 

to the descriptions of Mr. Root or Mr. Lowell, and 
often depart from them very widely. It frequently 
happens that the chief purpose of parties is to 
utilize the offices of the country as a means of 
power and influence and livelihood for the party 
leaders. They seize upon principles and embody 
them in the party platform, not on account of the 
public importance of these principles in securing 
national prosperity, but on account of their private 
importance in attracting votes to the organization. 
The main object of such a party is the control of 
the government for its own purposes, rather than 
the use of the government for what it deems to 
be the needs of the people. When a party has 
taken this shape the politician is no longer a 
broker in opinions; he is a broker in offices, in 
appropriations, in privileges. 

Any one who looks at the history of party 
politics in the United States in recent years will 
see to how great an extent this second meaning 
of the term "party" has supplanted the first. I 
propose in this lecture to trace the development 
of this perverted conception of party and to show 
the evils which have resulted from it. In the next 
lecture I shall discuss some of the remedies for 
this evil which have recently been introduced or 
advocated. In the concluding lecture I shall try to 



102 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

show what changes in our political life are needed 
for the successful operation of these remedies. 

If the men who in September 1787 signed the 
proposed constitution of the United States had 
returned to the scene of their labors in September 
1912, they would have been astonished to find that 
only two alterations had been made in their 
original work. By the Eleventh Article of Amend- 
ment to the Constitution, jurisdiction over suits 
brought against a state by citizens of other states 
or of foreign countries had been taken out of the 
federal courts. By the Twelfth Article the presi- 
dential electors, in voting for two persons, were 
compelled to specify on their ballots which they 
named for president and which for vice-president. 
This was all. The other so-called Amendments to 
the Constitution were supplements rather than 
amendments. They dealt with things outside of 
the original scope of the instrument. Some of 
them were trivial in their effects, some were of 
far-reaching importance; but whether trivial or 
important, they did not alter the machinery of 
federal government which was provided in the 
Constitution itself. 

Since the date named there have been two 



PARTY MACHINERY 103 

further changes in our constitutional machinery 
which are of somewhat greater importance than 
those that I have named ; one removing restrictions 
upon the levy of direct taxes by federal authority, 
and the other requiring that United States senators 
be elected by the people of the several states 
instead of by their legislatures. Yet even when 
these changes are taken into account, the alteration 
is small in comparison with the size and importance 
of the body of the instrument. 

To this permanence of constitutional machinery 
I doubt whether the history of any other active 
and growing state can offer a parallel. Certainly 
no democracy of ancient or mediaeval times can 
show anything like it, nor can any contemporary 
state of Europe point to a similar experience. 
During a period in which the Constitution of the 
United States remained virtually unaltered, Eng- 
land had by successive acts changed almost beyond 
recognition the manner of election of one house 
of Parliament and the range of powers of the 
other; France had made at least seven radical 
breaks in the continuity of her government, with 
corresponding changes in her constitutional provi- 
sions; the Holy Roman Empire had gone to 
destruction, and had gradually been reconstructed 
into a new Germany and a new Austria; Russia 



104 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

had made vigorous and partially successful at- 
tempts to reorganize its political system. It has 
been and is a matter of perpetual wonder that a 
group of men with limited experience of public 
affairs, chosen somewhat hurriedly and hampered 
at every stage by the necessity of compromise in 
order to get any constitution at all, should have 
created so enduring a structure. 

But while the machinery of the Constitution has 
remained unaltered, the working of that machinery 
has changed radically. If James Madison came 
back today he would find President and Congress 
and courts elected or appointed in the same ways 
and clothed with substantially the same powers 
that were contemplated in the debates of the 
Constitutional Convention. But side by side with 
the familiar names and authorities of these offices 
he would find a number of unfamiliar names and 
authorities of equal importance. He would hear 
of platforms and primaries, of caucuses and 
nominees, of conventions and bosses. He would 
be confronted with a strange set of powers and 
restrictions, nowhere mentioned in the Constitu- 
tion, but coordinate or at times superior in prac- 
tical importance to the powers and restrictions 
which the Constitution itself provided. Most of 
these new names would mean little or nothing to 



PARTY MACHINERY 105 

his mind. The few that he did understand, like 
''nominee," would seem like appalling importa- 
tions from the effete monarchies of Europe. He 
would find himself in a country whose legal forms 
of government were familiar but whose extra-legal 
customs and habits of government were wholly 
strange. 

The anomaly itself is startling; but the reasons 
for the anomaly are quite simple. The framers 
of the Constitution had arranged with great care 
and skill the mode of election of public officers and 
the duties of those officers after they were chosen. 
They had not attempted to arrange in any way 
the mode in which these officers should be nomi- 
nated or the pledges that might be exacted of 
them before they were chosen. A remarkable 
instance of this is seen in the provisions regarding 
presidential electors. It was the obvious expecta- 
tion of the Constitutional Convention that the 
members of the electoral college would exercise 
independent judgment in the selection of candi- 
dates for president and vice-president, instead of 
merely ratifying a nomination which had been 
prepared for them in advance. It took but four, 
or at most eight, years to show how futile was that 
expectation. There may have been a few people 
who were willing to give the electors discretionary 



106 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

power to use their best judgment in voting for a 
president. The great majority wished to know in 
advance the names of men for whom the several 
electors were going to vote. They insisted that 
this matter should be settled before the electors 
were chosen instead of afterward. They wished 
their representatives in the electoral college to be 
pledged to vote for the candidate they liked best. 

This change was gradually followed by another 
of the same character. The old theory of repre- 
sentative government was that the citizens in each 
district would send to the legislature a man in 
whose judgment they had confidence, in order that 
he might discuss with other members the questions 
that came before that body and then vote in the 
way that he thought wisest. This was what the 
framers of the Constitution expected. But the 
people were not satisfied with this way of doing 
things. They had ideas of their own on public 
questions. They wanted to know which way a 
candidate for Congress was going to vote on the 
subjects that were likely to come up for discussion. 
They often preferred to cast their ballots for a 
second-rate man who would reflect his constituents' 
opinions rather than for a first-rate man who 
might look at things differently. Measures, not 
men, was the cry. Not content with having their 



PARTY MACHINERY 107 

electors instructed in advance as to their vote for 
president, they insisted on having their congress- 
men pledged in advance as to the legislative 
measures which they would support. 

This change took place more slowly than the 
other, because it is relatively easy to determine 
what names are coming before the presidential 
elector for his choice, and relatively hard to 
determine what measures are coming before the 
congressman for his vote. Nor did it come with 
equal rapidity in all parts of the country. The 
change was slower where the old-fashioned aristo- 
cratic traditions were stronger. It was slower in 
the East than in the West, slower in the South 
than in the North. It is only within the present 
generation that it has become substantially com- 
plete. In my undergraduate days it was still a 
debated question whether a congressman should 
vote according to his own judgment or that of his 
constituents; and on a memorable occasion in 1878 
Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, one of the last and best 
of the political leaders of the old school, cour- 
ageously defied both the caucus of his party and 
the public opinion of his district by voting as he 
thought best. But as a general rule of political 
practice our congressmen as early as 1850 found 
themselves deprived of the right of independent 



108 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

judgment on main issues almost as completely as 
were the presidential electors. 

But who should nominate the candidates or 
define the issues to which congressmen should be 
pledged ? 

The actual work of nominating candidates for 
president was at first done by the members of 
Congress at the last session preceding the election. 
The Federalists did this in 1796; the Democrats 
followed their example in 1800. For twenty years 
thereafter the members of the electoral college, 
whatever their personal preference, found them- 
selves pledged in advance by an obligation, which 
had no constitutional sanction but which was too 
strong for them to break, to vote for the man that 
had been named by the members of their own 
party in the previous Congress. 

This way of doing things was not liked by the 
people. It was felt to be against the spirit of the 
Constitution. But as long as there was active 
opposition between Federalists and Democrats, the 
tactical advantages of having a strong party 
organization were so great that no one ventured 
to break away from the custom. When, however, 
the old parties began to dissolve after the close of 
the War of 1812 public sentiment against nomi- 
nation by congressional caucus made itself increas- 



PARTY MACHINERY 109 

ingly felt; and the year 1824 witnessed the death 
of this extra-constitutional agency. 

The downfall of the caucus was regarded as a 
great triumph for constitutional principles. The 
whole theory of the Constitution demanded that 
the executive and legislative powers be kept 
separate. The attempt of members of Congress 
to name the men for whom people should vote 
for president was a violation of this principle ; the 
abandonment of that attempt was hailed as a 
triumph of good government. The example that 
was set in Congress was rapidly followed if not 
actually anticipated in the legislatures of the 
several states. Up to 1820 candidates for the 
governorship were frequently and perhaps habitu- 
ally nominated by a caucus of the representatives 
of the party in the previous legislature. In the 
decade that followed the caucus gave place to the 
nominating convention. 

All this movement was, outwardly at least, an 
effort to conform to the principles of the Consti- 
tution. It is, however, very doubtful whether it 
contributed to good government. It had the effect 
of transferring the power of presidential nomi- 
nation from the congressmen to the men who 
nominated the congressmen. It did not destroy 
the connection between the two branches of the 



110 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

government. It simply substituted a subterranean 
connection for an open and public one. Previously 
men had ''pulled wires;" afterwards they "laid 
pipe. ' ' The f ramers of the Constitution had tried 
to prevent the executive and the legislative 
departments of the government from influencing 
one another unduly. They succeeded in preventing 
the responsible officers of the government from 
exercising that influence, but by the very act of 
so doing they transferred it to less responsible 
hands — to the hands that directed the machinery 
of nomination.* 

From the very first there had been astute 
observers who saw how easy it was for a small and 
unscrupulous group of men to control nominations 
in either party and restrict the choice of the voters 
to candidates of their own liking. In this, as in 
other byways of American politics, Aaron Burr 
was a pioneer. Burr worked in many states and 
by many means ; but the most enduring monument 
of his political sagacity was Tammany Hall. 
When the Society of Saint Tammany was founded 
in 1789 its purposes were chiefly social and 

* This idea has been worked out with great care by H. J. 
Ford in his Bise and Growth of American Politics. Much 
valuable material on the subject is contained in Gustavus 
Myers' History of Tammany Hall. 



PARTY MACHINERY 111 

patriotic. Under Burr's tutelage it became a 
dominant power in party politics. The leaders 
understood the theory as well as the practice of 
the means they used. "The nominating power," 
said Teunis Wortman in 1809, "is an omnipotent 
one. Though it approaches us in the humble 
attitude of the recommendation, its influence is 
irresistible. Every year's experience demonstrates 
that its recommendations are commands; that 
instead of presenting a choice it deprives us of 
all option." 

The lesson taught in New York had been learned 
by politicians of other cities and states. The 
dethronement of the congressional caucus in 1824 
simply opened the way for the application of 
Aaron Burr's methods to the affairs of the nation 
as a whole. 

In this widened application of the principles of 
Tammany Hall, Martin Van Buren was the leader. 
The effect of this change upon the character and 
position of the presidential office was soon seen. 
Down to the time of Andrew Jackson every 
president had been a man with a policy of his 
own. From the time of Van Buren until the Civil 
War, every president was to a greater or less 
extent a creature of the party organization. The 
seven occupants of the White House who preceded 



112 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Van Buren were men of distinction. The seven 
who followed him were not. So far was the con- 
vention system from expressing the popular will 
that it prevented a man like Henry Clay, idolized 
by his party and admired by his opponents, from 
realizing the object of his ambition. Bitterly did 
Clay exclaim at last that he was made the candidate 
of his party for president whenever it was going 
to be defeated and was deprived by chicanery of 
the nomination whenever the election of the Whig 
candidate was certain. 

But how was it possible for a few politicians to 
control conventions and nominations, in defiance 
of the wish of the majority of their party? I can 
only reply as the pessimistic Scotchman replied to 
the minister who assured him that God was 
stronger than the devil. "The devil," said the 
Scotchman, "makes up for his inferior strength 
by his superior activity." Men who could not 
themselves have been elected to high public office 
could by activity and trickery control the machin- 
ery which nominated men for office. Both state 
and nation regarded nominating conventions as 
something extra-constitutional. The result was 
that the law had for many years very little control 
over the election of delegates or the proceedings 
of delegates after they were elected. In cities like 



PARTY MACHINERY 113 

New York the professional politicians made use 
of barefaced fraud and sometimes of actual force 
to achieve their ends. In other places they were 
content with trickery. In still others they found 
a skilful use of the arts of persuasion sufficient. 
But whether the contest was decided by force or 
by fraud, by trickery or by persuasion, the pro- 
fessional politician and his henchmen under him, 
acting all the time and thoroughly organized, were 
in these early days at least more than a match for 
a much larger body of independent citizens who 
had their own business to attend to and could 
devote but moderate time to the devious ways of 
politics. 

What rewards were offered to the men who 
engaged in this sort of subterranean political 
activity ? 

A few gained high office, but only a few; of the 
men who have occupied the presidential chair since 
the time of Van Buren, not more than two have 
been active in the details of political management. 
A somewhat larger number of our American poli- 
ticians have been so constituted that they were 
content to do the work for the mere enjoyment of 
the power it gave them. It was reward enough 
for them to be in control of the affairs of their 
city or state, whether the public recognized their 



114 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

dominance or not. But to the majority of the 
leaders and to an overwhelming majority of their 
followers, some more tangible compensation was 
necessary. If they gave their time to politics they 
must be paid for it. If they were successful in 
placing their candidates in office they expected to 
be rewarded for their success ; — out of the public 
treasury, if necessary. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
almost the only chance for such reward was found 
in municipal offices and municipal contracts. The 
mayor, the board of aldermen, and even the judges, 
of a city had it in their power to give valuable 
favors. The fundamental principle on which 
Tammany appealed for support all through the 
nineteenth century was that membership in the 
Society and work for its candidates was a means 
to establish a claim for such favors. A municipal 
official, said Tammany, owed his primary obliga- 
tions and duties to the part of the community that 
nominated and elected him. His duties to the rest 
of the community were of little or no importance. 
The same theory was applied to a greater or less 
extent in almost every city. The possibility of 
using state offices as political rewards developed 
more slowly; but with the establishment and 
development of public works on a large scale, the 



PARTY MACHINERY 115 

patronage and contracts and franchises which were 
at the disposal of New York or Pennsylvania 
became pecuniary prizes; prizes of great value to 
a politician who could nominate a governor or a 
legislator that was weak enough to be dependent 
upon him. By the year 1825 the prostitution of 
state as well as municipal offices to party purposes 
had become a familiar spectacle. 

National politics were kept clean for a longer 
period. Until the beginning of Andrew Jackson's 
administration federal offices had not been regarded 
as a field for the emolument of the professional 
politician. There had been instances where corrupt 
men had misused national offices, but they were 
exceptions and were regarded as exceptions. Un- 
fortunately, just at the very moment when the 
overthrow of the caucus system left the field free 
for the intervention of the professional politician 
in national politics, two events occurred, one 
chargeable to the Whigs and the other to the 
Democrats, which distinctly lowered the character 
of both legislative and executive branches of the 
national government. In 1828, Congress passed a 
tariff law — the tariff of abominations, as it was 
popularly caUed — which was in many of its pro- 
visions so clearly a sacrifice of the general interests 
of the country to the special interests of individual 



116 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

districts that Congress seemed for the time being 
to have made politics rather than statesmanship its 
ideal. In the years immediately following, the 
President removed a large number of federal office- 
holders, although they had done their duty prop- 
erly, in order to be able to give their offices to his 
political supporters. In the forty years before 
Jackson's election there had been but seventy-four 
removals from office. In the first year after his 
election there were two thousand. Jackson himself 
was perfectly frank as to the character of this 
transaction. He was ready to accept and act on 
Marcy's phrase, ''To the victor belong the spoils." 
Patriotic and public spirited though he was, he 
failed to see the evils which would result from 
the adoption of the principle that public office was 
a reward for partisan service. 

The control of the federal offices as a prize of 
successful activity gave the party leaders a sub- 
stantial addition to the rewards that they were 
able to offer their followers. It was not merely 
the immediate money value of the positions that 
counted. The incumbent of a post office or a 
coUectorship, no matter how it was obtained, had 
a certain social standing which was more valuable 
than the salary of the office. It was a visible result 
of successful endeavor, and one of which he was 



PARTY MACHINERY 117 

proud. Moreover, the control of offices was a 
prize whose value was enhanced as the country- 
expanded. Each decade has seen a growth in the 
number and importance of our public functionaries. 
The aggregate of salaries paid by the government 
has increased much faster than the population. 
The aggregate influence of the officeholders has 
increased even faster than their salaries. For over 
half a century the administrative offices of the 
United States, outside of the army, the navy, and 
the judiciary, continued to be treated as rewards 
for party services; and even within these three 
departments political influence made itself felt to 
the advantage of the politicians and their friends 
and to the detriment of the public. 

Thus was established, in spite of the Constitution, 
that connection between legislature and executive 
which the framers of the Constitution had sought 
to prevent. The administrative officers of the 
government had received their places as rewards 
for their services to the party organization. The 
members of the legislative branch owed their 
nomination and election to office to the same 
consideration. The executive could not dictate to 
the legislature, nor could the legislature dictate to 
the executive; but each was bound to the nomi- 
nating power which was behind them by ties of 



118 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

gratitude for the past and of apprehension for 
the future. 

And the list of men who were thus bound to the 
party organization did not end with the office- 
holders and legislators. Every one who had 
benefited by a partisan measure was interested 
to keep the men that had passed it in power. 
Each valuable franchise or lucrative subsidy which 
was granted enlisted the recipient in the service 
of the party which gave it to him. The less the 
grant could be justified on grounds of public 
policy, the more abject was his dependence on the 
politicians for its continuance. The gravity of 
this danger in national politics did not become 
fully apparent until after the Civil War. Prior 
to that time there had been a good deal of unwise 
special legislation by the states and some by 
Congress; but it had seldom taken such a shape 
that it could become a party issue. The years from 
1850 to 1857 saw a great many wasteful grants 
of public land in aid of railroads ; but this was an 
abuse which Democrats and Republicans had vied 
with one another in promoting, and for which 
North and South were equally responsible. Neither 
organization and neither section could point the 
finger of scorn at the other. 

But the course of tariff legislation after the 



PARTY MACHINERY 119 

Civil War was such that large financial interests 
became concerned to keep the Republican party in 
power. During the war the North had imposed 
heavy internal revenue taxes on all manufacturing 
industries ; and it had at the same time laid duties 
on imports considerably higher than the internal 
revenue taxes. The amount of protection actually 
given was not represented by the whole duty, but 
by the difference between the duty on things 
produced abroad and the internal revenue tax on 
the same things produced at home. After the close 
of the war nearly all the internal revenue taxes 
were abolished. It was expected that duties on 
imports would be correspondingly reduced at the 
same time. Measures to this effect were introduced 
in 1867. They failed of passage, not because there 
was any difference of opinion on the general policy, 
but because the Senate and House could not agree 
on details. 

With the internal revenue tax abolished and the 
duty on imports maintained, many industries 
enjoyed an amount of protection which had never 
been intended. The immediate result was a great 
apparent prosperity in those particular lines of 
industry. The secondary result was in many 
instances overproduction and disaster. Which- 
ever way the law worked, the representatives of 



120 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

the business in question found themselves in pos- 
session of plausible arguments against a change. 
"Will you destroy an industry which employs so 
many men at high wages?" said the prosperous 
ones. ' ' Will you add to the burdens of an industry 
which is already in trouble?" said the unpros- 
perous ones. The fact was that the abnormal 
degree of protection had created an artificial set 
of industrial conditions, and that when those 
conditions were removed some one was bound to 
suffer. 

The alignment on the question of tariff reduction 
was not at first a strictly partisan one. The 
Pennsylvania Democrats were for the most part 
protectionists. The Western Republicans were in 
many instances free traders. But as time went 
on the Republican party became more and more 
committed to the maintenance of the tariff in 
substantially its existing shape; or, more accu- 
rately, to the principle that duties should not be 
reduced unless the representatives of the protected 
industries themselves approved. Under such cir- 
cumstances the Republican party organization 
could count on the support, not merely of the 
officeholders it had rewarded or the congressmen 
it had nominated, but of the industries to which 



PARTY MACHINERY 121 

it had given protective duties that were or appeared 
to be exorbitant. 

In a somewhat similar way the silver mining 
interests became affiliated with those who controlled 
the councils of the Democratic party, and more 
than once brought the monetary system of the 
country into grave financial peril as a means of 
promoting their own particular industry. I do 
not mean that all or a majority of those who 
advocated free silver coinage were consciously 
intending to sacrifice the interest of the whole to 
that of the part. Most of the Democratic leaders 
had persuaded themselves that free silver would 
be good for the country as completely as the 
Republican leaders had persuaded themselves that 
a high protective tariff was good for the country. 
It is extraordinarily easy for a man to become 
convinced that a thing that will put him and his 
friends in public office is good for every one else. 

This was what constituted the most dangerous 
feature of the whole situation. For under in- 
fluences like these, good men as well as bad lent 
themselves to that perversion of the party system 
which made them brokers in privileges rather than 
brokers in opinions and led them to govern in the 
interest of special classes rather than in the 
interest of the whole body politic. 



THE EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 
CONTEOL 

In the previous lecture I explained in some 
detail the causes which led to an abnormal develop- 
ment of party government in the United States. 
All will admit that this development has been 
attended with grave evils. Our cities have been 
made the prey of political organizations with 
rather notorious frequency. Our states have at 
times fared no better. In the administration of 
our national government there have been fewer 
open scandals, but there has been much dangerous 
partisanship. 

Though people have recognized the evils, they 
have not recognized how deeply they were rooted 
in our system of government ; and when they have 
tried to correct them they have usually been con- 
tent with superficial or partial remedies which did 
not go to the heart of the matter. There have been 
frequent movements for reform in individual cities 
and states. There has been a wave of agitation 
against machine control of politics which has 



EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 123 

spread over the country within the last few years. 
But the great majority of the proposed reforms 
deal with symptoms and manifestations of the evil 
under which we suffer, rather than with the under- 
lying causes that produce that evil. They offer 
palliatives rather than remedies. 

The first and simplest palliative for the misuse 
of party government is to put the other party into 
office. ' ' Turn the rascals out ! " is the popular cry 
whenever any extraordinary breach of public trust 
is discovered in city or state. This is undoubtedly 
a good policy as far as it goes. If politicians think 
that they are going to be turned out of office when 
they are found to have abused public confidence, 
it will make them more careful to avoid flagrant 
or notorious misuse of their power. This penalty 
therefore has great use as a deterrent. As a 
remedy its value is less clear. When the repre- 
sentatives of one party are turned out the repre- 
sentatives of another party come in — sometimes 
immediately, sometimes after a brief spasm of 
nonpartisan government. The old political ma- 
chinery is at hand for the use of the other party. 
The old temptations are there, and the old oppor- 
tunities are there. The public has simply sub- 
stituted one political machine for another. It is 
better off, in so far as the new incumbents are 



124 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 

frightened by the fate of their predecessors; it is 
worse off, in so far as the new incumbents are 
hungrier than their predecessors. Whether the net 
result will be good or bad depends upon the cir- 
cumstances of each individual case. As a general 
rule, however, the policy of turning the rascals out 
while leaving the organization of the body politic 
unchanged has an outcome which has been aptly 
described in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of 
St. Luke: 

''When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, 
he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and 
finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house 
whence I came out. 

"And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and 
garnished. 

''Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other 
spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter 
in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man 
is worse than the first. ' ' 

Some who see the futility of substituting one 
party machine for another try to go one step 
further back, and strike at the sources of the 
corruption by penalizing the men who have bene- 
fited by bad government. "Punish predatory 
wealth ! " is the cry of these reformers. It was 
this that gave force to the Granger movement in 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 125 

1870, when the farmers of the upper Mississippi 
valley were aroused by the misuse of the powers 
of the railroads to take the matter of legislation 
into their own hands and pass drastic laws con- 
cerning rates. It is this same cry which makes 
itself heard in both Democratic and Progressive 
parties today. 

But the punishment of predatory wealth is an 
easier thing to promise than to perform. The 
wealthy depredators almost always manage to turn 
their profits into hard cash months or perhaps years 
before the public is aroused to any serious action. 
By this time the only persons that can be reached 
are the small investors, who have had no part in 
the ill-gotten profits and whose only sin is that 
they have been too easily deceived. Alas for these 
small investors! ^'Better a wrong victim than 
none at all," says the public; ''we do not know 
who is to blame, but we know that somebody ought 
to suffer;" and the politician takes his choice 
between sacrificing the interests of the investor as 
a means of securing his own popularity, or levying 
blackmail upon the investor as a price for not 
sacrificing him. 

For predatory poverty is just as dangerous a 
thing as predatory wealth — a little better, perhaps, 
in that it has the interest of a larger section of the 



126 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

community in view; a good deal worse, in that its 
acts are habitually blinder and the amount of aim- 
less destruction larger. Over and over again it has 
happened that the politicians, by destroying the 
profits of capital in obedience to a wave of popular 
feeling, have interfered with the development of 
the whole community for many years to come. 
This was the case in the upper Mississippi valley 
at the time of the Granger movement. Laws passed 
in 1873 and 1874 hurt the railroad investors by 
depriving them of their profits; but they hurt the 
shippers and the general business interests of the 
states far more, by preventing for five years that 
investment of capital in railroads which was needed 
to furnish adequate transportation for farm 
products. This experience seems likely to be 
repeated at the present day, when arbitration 
boards are constantly compelling railroads to raise 
their wages and the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission is constantly refusing to allow them to raise 
their rates. The effects on transportation indus- 
tries in discharge of men and curtailment of 
service are already deplorable, and seem likely to 
grow worse in the immediate future.* 

* The last two sentences are left as they were written in 
the spring of 1914. Since that time the Interstate Commerce 
Commission has taken action allowing the railroads certain 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 127 

The policy of turning the rascals out means a 
change of hands that hold the reins of party 
government. The policy of punishing predatory 
wealth means a change in the direction in which 
those hands drive us. Neither of these changes 
goes far enough to free us from the political evils 
under which we suffer. Neither of them solves our 
problem as a whole. They are emotional remedies 
rather than practical ones. They serve to punish 
an individual offender — sometimes the right one, 
sometimes the wrong one; they do not serve to 
reform the evil inherent in our political system. 

There are, however, several measures which have 
been tried in the past that modify the system itself 
in certain essential particulars and are offered by 
their advocates as practical remedies for the dis- 
eases of the body politic. These measures may 
be grouped under five heads: 1. The separation 
of national from local issues. 2. A nonpartisan 
civil service. 3. The substitution of direct for 
indirect methods of legislation. 4. Direct nomi- 
nation by the people. 5. Assurance of direct 
responsibility to the people by a system which 
allows the voters to recall an of&cial who for any 

needed increases of rates; and the whole industrial outlook 
has been thereby improved. 



128 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

reason ceases to carry out the views of those who 
elected him. The first two of these have been fully- 
tried; the third, measurably so. The fourth is 
still in the experimental stage ; the fifth has hardly 
passed beyond the status of a project. I propose 
to give a brief analysis of each of these remedies, 
to show what it has accomplished or is likely to 
accomplish, and what indirect evils and dangers, 
if any, it brings in its train. 

First in order of historical development is the 
separation of national from local issues. This has 
been so generally accepted as a principle by think- 
ing men of the present generation that it is hard 
for some of us to realize how recently it originated, 
or how radical a proposition it seemed fifty years 
ago. 

In my own boyhood it was assumed that every 
practical man belonged either to one party or to 
the other, and that under all ordinary circum- 
stances he voted the whole party ticket, national, 
state, and local. In aggravated cases he might 
''scratch" an objectionable candidate without 
losing the right to consider himself a reputable 
member of the party and to ask such favors of 
the party manager as reputable members might 
expect. But to vote for the candidate of the other 



EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 129 

party was an extreme of independence which 
relatively few ventured to practice. 

When this feeling prevailed it was almost 
impossible to prevent party managers from nomi- 
nating bad men for local offices at any time when 
national issues were important. The more funda- 
mental the national questions involved, the surer 
did the political managers feel of being able to cast 
the full party vote for local candidates, whether 
good or bad. "Matters of national policy," they 
would say to the voters, "are of so much greater 
moment than anything which a state official can 
accomplish within his own limited sphere of good 
or harm that you are bound by the strongest 
considerations not to weaken the party as a whole 
by the threat to bolt a part of the ticket." The 
Constitution had attempted to separate as far as 
possible the activity of the national government 
from that of the separate states and cities. The 
effect of the party organization was to bind them 
together. 

Loudest in their cry for the obligations of party 
regularity were the politicians of New York City. 
But it was in New York City first of all that the 
reaction in favor of independent voting on munici- 
pal issues developed. In the years from 1867 to 
1871 the Tweed Ring had plundered the public 



130 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

on so gigantic a scale that all good citizens felt 
compelled to unite to overthrow it. In spite of 
this union of good citizens, the Ring felt so secure 
in its position as a representative of democratic 
regularity that it openly defied public opinion 
inside its own party as well as outside. In 1871 
the issue between party regularity and good 
municipal government was clearly drawn; and the 
side which stood for good government won 
decisively. The defeat of the Ring was followed 
by the indictment and imprisonment of its leaders. 
It was an object lesson of the first importance in 
the possibility and the necessity of independent 
municipal voting. 

The lesson was taken to heart in other cities 
besides New York. The election of 1871 was the 
beginning of a radical change of sentiment regard- 
ing the obligations of party regularity in connec- 
tion with municipal affairs. Slowly but surely 
people came to the conclusion that the mayor of 
a city was first and above all things else a man 
engaged in conducting a number of important 
lines of business for the public benefit; that the 
primary question was whether he was likely to be 
honest and efficient in doing the business in hand; 
and that his attitude on the tariff or the currency, 
however important in determining whether you 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 131 

wished to send Mm to Congress, had little or no 
importance in determining his fitness to be mayor. 
Forty years ago these were novel arguments. The 
man who advanced them was considered an idealist. 
People admitted their force as theories, but only 
acted upon these theories on rare occasions, when 
the party leaders had been detected in some 
peculiarly atrocious attempt to sacrifice the public 
interest to that of their friends and associates. 
Today they are accepted in most parts of the 
country as practical foundations of good local 
government. "While it is still true that the voters 
in a large number of towns prefer to vote the 
straight party ticket, local as well as national, the 
manager who presumes too much on this preference 
learns to his cost how slight is the hold of party 
regularity in local issues. Many cities, by adopting 
the commission form of government, have tried to 
make municipal politics permanently independent 
of party organization; and the advantage of 
accomplishing this result has been so great as to 
outweigh the serious disadvantages, both in theory 
and in practice, which attend the operation of the 
commission system. 

This change in sentiment has been rendered 
much more effective by two recent changes in 
political practice. 



132 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

The first of these is the separation of the dates 
of local and national elections. In the old times 
it was customary in most parts of the country to 
vote for national, state, and local candidates on the 
same day, if not on the same ticket. This of itself 
made the sentiment of party regularity stronger 
than it is at an election where people vote for local 
officers only. The importance of the national issue 
made the local issues look relatively unimportant. 
The politicians took full advantage of this; and 
they also developed complex systems of trading 
votes in which members of both organizations 
worked hand in hand to sacrifice the independent 
nominees of each party and elect those who were 
subservient to their respective machines. Separa- 
tion of the dates has made it practicable to 
separate the issues and has limited the opportuni- 
ties for trading votes. The old argument about 
regularity is far less effective when local and 
national elections come on different days. 

Another change which is bound to work in the 
same direction is the election of United States 
senators by the people. 

In the old days it was never possible to elect a 
legislature on the basis of state issues in a year 
when a United States senator was going to be 
chosen. You might approve the position of the 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 133 

Republican party in your state on canals or on 
prohibition, or on economical management of the 
state treasury, or any one of a dozen local issues. 
But if you wanted to see a Democrat elected to the 
United States senate you had to vote for a Demo- 
cratic candidate for the state legislature, even if 
he was bibulous, extravagant, unprogressive, and 
averse to building the canals you wanted. His 
chief business, after all, was to elect a United 
States senator. A legislature has to elect a senator 
twice in six years. In those states, therefore, which 
elected their legislatures for two years at a time, 
two out of every three legislatures were chosen on 
national issues and only one of the three on local 
ones. This gave the leaders in party politics a 
stronger hold over nominations and elections to 
the state legislature than they would otherwise 
have possessed, and had an effect on the conduct 
of state politics and state business far more serious 
than has generally been recognized. Prior to the 
last amendment to the Constitution, complete 
separation of state and national issues in politics 
was impossible. Today it rests with the voters 
themselves whether they will make it possible or 
not. 

It may be said of the separation of local and 
national politics that it is unqualifiedly good in 



134 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

principle. It, however, stops far short of being 
a complete solution of our problem; because the 
prizes of either national or local politics, taken 
separately, are sufficiently large to furnish remu- 
neration to those who can control the nominating 
machinery in either field. The separation deprives 
the politicians of one effective weapon in forcing 
machine candidates on an unwilling electorate. 
But they have other equally effective ones left at 
their command. 

The second means of preventing the perversion 
of party government has been the series of meas- 
ures known as civil service reform, imposing 
certain rudimentary tests of fitness upon candi- 
dates for office and preventing the removal of 
officeholders for political reasons. 

When Marcy and Jackson advanced the theory 
that federal offices ought to be given as a reward 
for political activity, they had no idea of the 
damage that they were doing. The force of 
federal officeholders in 1830 was small in number; 
the problems with which they had to deal were 
simpler than is the case today. There was some 
plausibility in the arguments used by Jackson 
and his followers as to the danger of allowing 
these officeholders to form an official class of 
permanent appointees, removed from the mutations 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 135 

of politics. But the practical working of the spoils 
system was far worse than any one could have 
anticipated. If people received and held offices 
as a reward for political activity, it meant that 
they were encouraged to serve their party at the 
expense of the government. This not only led to 
the appointment of men to positions for which they 
had no special training or fitness — an increasing 
evil as the service became more complex — but it 
encouraged many of them to neglect their duties 
and to connive at the plunder of the public 
treasury by men who were influential in the party. 
The $75,000,000 of revenue frauds discovered in 
the second administration of President Grant were 
but the logical consequence of the Jacksonian 
principle that the spoils belong to the victor. 

Organized agitation for reform of the federal 
civil service began in 1867. This movement was 
at first made the object of ridicule. But it 
gathered strength when people saw what glaring 
frauds were being perpetrated under the old 
system. The danger of regarding appointment to 
office as a matter of party favor was strikingly 
brought home to the people in 1881, when Guiteau 
assassinated President Garfield as a matter of 
private revenge for his failure to get the position 
he wanted. Even then it is doubtful whether the 



136 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Republican politicians who were in control of 
Congress would have allowed any serious change 
in a system which contributed to their power and 
to their friends' profit, except for the strong 
indications that the Democrats were going to be 
successful in the presidential election of 1884. 
Fearing that they would lose control of the federal 
offices in any event, the Republicans in 1883 made 
a virtue of necessity and passed a bill establishing 
a classified civil service with preliminary exami- 
nations and permanence of tenure. At first only 
fourteen thousand offices were included in this 
classified service; but successive presidents have 
made use of the authority given them to extend 
the scope of the provisions of the Act of 1883, so 
that about three fifths of the four hundred thou- 
sand federal employees are now subject to its 
provisions. In local administration the reform 
has not made corresponding progress; but a few 
states and a considerable number of municipalities 
are now following the example of the federal 
government. 

Civil service reform, like independent municipal 
voting, is thoroughly good as far as it goes. Its 
direct effect in promoting good government is, 
however, limited. It applies almost entirely to the 
lower ranks of the service. It does not apply to 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 137 

the positions that give a man power to dominate 
the policy of the country. The really important 
federal offices are included for the most part in 
the forty per cent of unclassified places, not in the 
sixty per cent of classified ones. Those who have 
observed the working of the system most carefully 
believe that the chief good that we have accom- 
plished is an indirect one. We have broken down 
the theory that offices are to be regarded as spoils. 
The people who continue to view public office in 
that light no longer venture to avow their heresies 

openly. 

The two measures thus far described restrict the 
power of the politicians by limiting the patronage 
at their disposal. The three others go more to the 
heart of the matter, and strive directly to curb 
the power of party organizations in the making of 
laws, the nomination of candidates, or the action 
of officials after they have been nominated and 

elected. 

The first of these means is the system of direct 
legislation by the people; either through the 
medium of state constitutions or by the agency 
of the referendum and the initiative. 

The popular distrust of legislation by representa- 
tive assembly dates from about the middle of the 
nineteenth century. Down to that time it had been 



138 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

supposed that this was the natural method, and 
in fact the only good method, for making laws in 
a large commonwealth. In a small city all the 
citizens can attend an assembly or town meeting, 
can hear measures discussed, and can vote upon 
them after full deliberation. The vote will repre- 
sent more or less adequately the public opinion of 
the community. But in a large city this is 
difficult; and in a state or nation it is obviously 
impossible. The system of representative govern- 
ment was devised to meet this difficulty. It allows 
people in each district to select the man whom 
they regard as best fitted to act as their proxy. 
These representatives can meet with one another, 
to discuss the proposed measures of common con- 
cern and decide what is best for the community; 
and their votes, taken after such discussion, ought 
to represent the general sense of the state or nation 
in the same way that the vote of the town meeting 
represents the general sense of the borough or 
village. Such was the theory of representative 
government as it was held with little question until 
about 1850. 

Such also had been the practical working of the 
system in England in the days when Parliament 
was establishing its supremacy. Down to the 
seventeenth century the English Parliament was 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 139 

essentially a place where representatives of dif- 
ferent districts and different interests met in order 
to shape their opinion intelligently on the affairs 
of the kingdom. It created a national public 
opinion in the same way that a town meeting 
creates a local public opinion. There was no other 
adequate agency for this purpose. There were few 
newspapers. There was little opportunity for 
public information of any kind regarding the 
conduct of national and international affairs. Had 
it not been for the necessity of calling Parliaments 
in order to levy taxes, the king might have taken 
advantage of this public ignorance to undermine 
the liberties of different parts of the kingdom 
separately. The country gentlemen who went to 
Parliament found out what was going on. They 
deliberated with representatives from other parts 
of the kingdom and made plans for common action. 
"When they went home they told the people who 
had sent them what new measures were being 
proposed or enforced and what they ought to think 
about them. 

The system of public law which was framed by 
the English Parliaments was an expression of the 
public opinion thus formed, and derived its essen- 
tial force from the fact that the sentiment of the 
nation was behind it, rather than from the fact 



140 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

that it had been discussed by two houses, one of 
which was a representative body. But it was 
natural enough that people who compared the 
public law of England with that of France or 
Austria and saw how much better it was should 
overvalue the machinery that produced it, and 
seek the cause of the excellence of English law not 
in the intelligence of English public opinion but 
in the details of its method of legislation. Montes- 
quieu himself fell into precisely this error. 

The men who framed our state and federal 
constitutions made the same mistake as Montes- 
quieu, and were much concerned to follow in detail 
all the forms of English Parliamentary organiza- 
tion. We tried to establish two legislative chambers 
in every important political unit. It is because 
Parliament had a House of Lords as well as a 
House of Commons that so many of our munici- 
palities, scattered all over the nation, have a board 
of aldermen as well as a court of common council. 

But it gradually appeared that these assemblies 
did not fulfil the function which the theory of 
representative government assigned them. They 
were not places where the best men from each 
community went to make up their minds about 
public questions. The representatives were sent 
with more or less specific instructions. They were 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 141 

chosen for the purpose of putting into effect cer- 
tain ideas and principles already expressed in the 
party platform. The telegraph and the printing 
press have deprived parliaments and congresses of 
their function as agencies for the making of public 
opinion. It was almost always formed before they 
assembled. 

But while the deliberative power of such assem- 
blies has been diminished, their law-making power 
has very greatly increased. The authority of 
Parliament in the sixteenth century was preca- 
rious; even in the seventeenth it was by no means 
unquestioned. A parliamentary statute or ordi- 
nance which did not have the will of the people 
behind it was a plaything for the king to toy with 
as he liked. Today an Act of Parliament in Eng- 
land or of Congress in America, even when 
distasteful to the majority of the people, is a 
thing which cannot easily be disobeyed or ignored. 

This change of conditions, by which parliamen- 
tary assemblies ceased to make public opinion and 
began to make laws which were independent of 
public opinion, has rendered modern representative 
government, in its practical working, a very dif- 
ferent thing from what the theorists have contem- 
plated. It has made it worth while for the 
professional politician who is pursuing selfish ends 



142 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

of his own to see that the men elected to positions 
in such a body are those that he can influence, and 
that the statement of principles which the public 
has exacted of them is such as he can approve. 
Both of these opportunities have been given him 
by his control of the nominating convention. If 
it is completely under his hands he can dictate 
both the candidates and the platform. If it is 
partially under his hands he can at least prevent 
the nomination of candidates of outspoken inde- 
pendence and the adoption of platforms with 
inconveniently frank declaration of principles. In 
fact, it matters very little what the platform says, 
so long as the candidate is Mr. Pliable and not 
Mr. Obstinate. There are numerous precedents in 
American politics for ignoring the pledges of party 
platforms. In fact, the whole situation reminds 
one of the experience of an Ohio politician who 
tried to view the scenery of the Alleghany moun- 
tains from the platform of a Pennsylvania railroad 
train, instead of staying inside the car, as the rules 
required. "When the conductor called his attention 
to the Company's rules, he asked sharply what a 
platform was made for if not to stand on. The 
conductor closed the discussion by saying, ''You 
are a practical politician, Mr. Blank. You should 
know that a platform is not made to stand on; a 



EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 143 

platform is made to get in on ! " Of course it may 
happen that the political leaders, in their anxiety 
to make the candidate suit the organization, may 
fail to suit the people and therefore be defeated 
at the polls; but inasmuch as there is usually 
another party organization on the opposite side 
working for subservient candidates and machine- 
made platforms, this danger is not always so great 
as it appears. 

That part of the work of legislative bodies which 
first caused popular dissatisfaction was their 
liberality — to use no harsher word — in granting 
valuable franchises to the politicians and their 
friends without adequate regard for the protection 
of the public. Even in the decades preceding the 
Civil "War this practice aroused much adverse 
criticism; and in the years immediately following 
the war the power was so abused that constitutional 
provisions were adopted by many of the states 
which were directed specifically against this evil. 
It became customary to require corporations to be 
organized under general laws and to restrict or 
prohibit the grant of special charters and the 
special privileges which usually attach thereto. 

This was the first step in limiting legislative 
powers. A second followed almost immediately 
thereafter. A new form of state constitution 



144 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

became fashionable, much longer and more explicit 
than the old, which included a great deal of matter 
that was not in a strict sense constitutional law 
at all. A constitution, in the old and accredited 
meaning of the word, prescribes the powers and 
functions of the different departments of the 
government. These new-fashioned constitutions 
included a great many general laws regarding the 
conduct of corporations and individuals. When- 
ever a law of this kind was incorporated in a state 
constitution it had the effect of limiting the power 
of the legislature. If a great body of public and 
private law was thus made part of the constitution, 
this meant that the legislature had no authority 
to make any fundamental changes in the law 
except by the slow process of constitutional amend- 
ment, which required a submission of the proposed 
changes to a vote of the people. 

These long American constitutions were severely 
criticised by European publicists, who said that 
we did not know what the word ''constitution'* 
really meant. This criticism was in some respects 
wide of the mark. The reason why our constitu- 
tions were made so encyclopaedic was not that the 
people of the United States had wrong ideas as to 
what should be put in a constitution, but that they 
were unwilling to leave the legislatures free to vote 



EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 145 

on certain important subjects, and therefore incor- 
porated their views on these subjects in the 
constitution as the easiest way of tying the 
legislature's hands. 

Within recent years they have found a more 
direct means of accomplishing the desired result 
by the introduction of the referendum. Under this 
system a legislature submits proposed changes in 
law to popular vote to determine whether they 
shall become effective or not. This mode of legis- 
lation originated in Switzerland. After many 
experiments in the different cantons it was incor- 
porated into the Swiss federal constitution in 1874. 
Two decades later Switzerland supplemented the 
referendum by the adoption of the initiative, or 
right of proposal of laws by popular petition. 
Some of our states have for many years applied 
the principle of the referendum in a limited way. 
Certain classes of legislative acts, such as the 
contraction of state debts, or the selection of sites 
for public buildings, have in such states required 
confirmation by popular vote before they went 
into effect. In 1897 Iowa made this requirement 
general in regard to all grants of franchises of 
any kind whatever. But it was not until 1898 that 
the referendum was first adopted in its complete 
form by South Dakota. Since that time about 



146 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

one third of the states have introduced it to a 
greater or less extent into their organic law. 

With the adoption of the principle of the refer- 
endum, and the initiative which is apt to go with it, 
the abandonment of the old theory of representa- 
tive government is complete. The legislature is 
now no longer an agency for framing public 
opinion and making the laws which public opinion 
demands, but a conference committee on the affairs 
of the state, one of whose duties is to submit drafts 
of proposed legislation to the people in order to 
see whether the majority of voters likes them. 
The power of the leaders of nominating conventions 
to secure the passage of such laws as they wish 
and the profits and emoluments incident thereto 
is by this means seriously impaired if not wholly 
destroyed. 

But there are two other changes which are 
intended by their advocates to complete the over- 
throw of old-fashioned political machinery more 
fully than can be accomplished by the referendum 
or initiative. The first of these is the direct 
primary. Observing the evils which arise from 
nominating conventions, many of our reformers 
would give the people the opportunity to nominate 
candidates themselves. They would do away with 
representative assemblies for nomination as well 



REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 147 

as representative assemblies for legislation, and 
would have the name of the party candidate 
decided by a majority of the popular vote within 
the party. 

The direct primary is no new thing. It was 
tentatively introduced in Pennsylvania about 
1870. Abandoned in the East except by a few 
municipalities, it was for two decades occasionally 
tried in the West and frequently in the South. 
But during these early years it was applied only 
to town or county nominations. The movement for 
state-wide primaries is a much more recent one. 
It has gained rapid headway in the past three or 
four years. In 1912 fifteen states held primaries 
to determine preferences for presidential candi- 
dates; and a considerable number of others used 
this agency to nominate candidates for governor, 
senator, or congressman at large. 

Still more novel, and in some respects more 
radical, is the fifth and last proposal of the advo- 
cates of direct popular government. They would 
make it possible for a certain proportion of the 
voters to petition for the recall of an obnoxious 
or unpopular official, and compel the holding of 
a new election to see whether he is to be permitted 
to serve out his term of office. Many localities are 
experimenting with the system of the recall; but 



148 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

it is too soon to say how far those that have tried 
it are satisfied with it, or how widely their example 
is likely to be followed. The plan is still in the 
experimental stage. 

Regarding the success of all these more thorough- 
going plans for curbing the power of professional 
politicians, we may say what Ostrogorski, that 
acute and careful Russian student of American 
politics, says concerning the direct primary: 
''Neither the sanguine hopes of the reformers nor 
the fears of the bosses have been entirely justi- 
fied. . . . Frauds are not prevented by the new 
system. Many bad candidates are defeated who 
would be nominated in convention, but the hap- 
hazard vote of the multitude rejects good men 
against whom a convention would not dare to come 
out." And after an enumeration of minor evils, 
all the more significant because of Ostrogorski 's 
sympathy with progressive views and methods, he 
adds: "These unsatisfactory results of the direct 
primary cannot be considered as accidental." 

"Why these means have failed to realize the hopes 
of their advocates, and what more fundamental 
reforms in practice and in thought are necessary 
to make government by the people effective, are 
questions which I shall discuss in the concluding 
lecture. 



VI 

THE SEAT OF POWER TODAY 

When party government was at its height the 
leaders of the organization had a decisive influence 
on the nomination of candidates and the passage 
of laws. Public opinion counted for comparatively 
little, except as an indirect deterrent of mistakes 
that might lose elections. The measures which I 
have described in the last lecture — the initiative, 
the referendum, the direct primary — were efforts 
to make organization count for less and public 
opinion for more. Why have they disappointed 
the hopes of their advocates? 

Chiefly because it is impossible, except in grave 
emergencies, to make unorganized public opinion 
effective in practical politics. If, as Mr. Root well 
says in his book on The Citizen's Part in Govern- 
ment, all the voters went to the polls without 
previous discussion and cast their several votes for 
the candidates that each man liked best, the great 
majority of votes would be thrown away. ' ' Human 
nature is such that long before an election could 
be reached some men who wished for the offices 



150 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

would have taken steps to secure in advance the 
support of voters; some men who had business or 
property interests which they desired to have 
protected or promoted through the operation of 
government would have taken steps to secure 
support for candidates in their interest; and some 
men who were anxious to advance principles or 
policies that they considered to be for the good 
of the commonwealth would have taken steps to 
secure support for candidates representing those 
principles and policies. All of these would have 
got their friends and supporters to help them, and 
in each group a temporary organization would 
have grown up for effective work in securing 
support. Under these circumstances, when the 
votes came to be cast, the candidates of some of 
these extempore organizations would inevitably 
have a plurality of votes, and the great mass of 
voters who did not follow any organized leadership 
would find that their ballots were practically 
thrown away by reason of being scattered about 
among a great number of candidates instead of 
being concentrated so as to be effective. ' ' 

We see this fact elucidated in the workings of 
the direct primary. Occasionally it happens that 
a man is so prominent or so conspicuously well 
fitted for the duties of the office that he can secure 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 151 

votes enough to nominate him by the spontaneous 
impulse of his fellow citizens. But such cases are 
rare. A preliminary campaign is usually neces- 
sary. The man of ability who will not take the 
trouble to make such a campaign gets fewer votes 
than his less able opponent who has the time and 
money to spend in organizing his followers and 
creating a public sentiment in his behalf. It has 
become a proverb in certain states that any man 
who wishes to be chosen for office must incur the 
trouble of making two campaigns, one for nomi- 
nation and the other for election. Political chicane 
has not been eliminated. It has simply been trans- 
ferred from the hands of a party organization to 
the hands of individuals or groups of individuals. 
The managers of the old party machines tried 
to find out what their followers wanted by personal 
conversation between man and man. The ward 
leader talked with the men whose votes he con- 
trolled, and knew what they thought and felt. 
The district leader talked with the ward leaders, 
and on the basis of that conversation made up his 
mind what he wished to do. The members of the 
county committee talked with the leaders in the 
several districts and obtained full knowledge of 
the demands of party men in different sections. 
The successful politician was the man who under- 



152 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

stood the art of mixing with men, of getting at 
what they wanted and coming to an understanding 
with them as to the degree in which their several 
wants could be gratified. It was thus that the 
sentiment was organized which could carry con- 
ventions and determine nominations. It was on 
these means, supplemented by the influence of 
great orators and debaters who argued in defense 
of the plans thus framed, that the older politicians 
relied for securing acceptance of their projects. 

The modern politician must go to work in a 
different way. He must appeal to a wider public 
sentiment — a sentiment which has been created, 
not by a vast number of separate conversations but 
by the influence of a few newspapers and maga- 
zines upon their readers. It is through the press — 
daily, weekly, or monthly — that the American 
people forms its opinion as to men and measures. 
The success or failure of a candidate in securing 
the nomination depends largely upon the support 
which he receives from this quarter. The man who 
accomplishes most in modern politics is he who 
recognizes this fact most fully. It is not by the 
personal influence which was characteristic of the 
old party system that nominations are now secured 
and the way made clear for the passage of laws. 
It is by the influence of the printed page, which 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 153 

enables the man who controls it to determine 
thousands of votes for good or for evil. 

In 1824 we overthrew the legislative caucus as 
a dominant power in politics, and left the field 
open for the party machine. Today we are over- 
throwing the party machine and are leaving the 
field open to the press. In neither case have we 
provided for the expression of a spontaneous or 
unorganized public opinion. We have simply sub- 
stituted one method of organization for another. 
Under the old system the goodness or badness of 
a party machine determined whether Congress 
would make good laws or the administration good 
appointments. Under the new system the good- 
ness or badness of newspapers is likely to determine 
whether the initiative and the referendum will be 
used to promote intelligent legislation; whether 
the direct primary will give us good candidates or 
bad candidates; whether we shalf be able to sur- 
mount the perils with which the experiment of the 
recall is attended. 

Among the many changed conditions of Ameri- 
can politics, the growth of an independent press is 
perhaps the most important. Prior to 1850 it was 
regarded as almost indispensable for a newspaper 
to belong to a party. Before the nominating 
convention met the different sections of the party 



154 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

would have different newspapers supporting their 
own particular candidates or measures. After the 
nominating convention was over the newspapers 
were expected to fall into line just as the different 
sections of the party fell into line ; and they quite 
generally did so. The papers that were really 
independent were few in number, and might be 
divided into two classes: the very good and the 
very bad. Journals of each of these classes found 
their advice neglected by astute politicians; the 
very good, because their readers were supposed 
to be cranks, and too frequently gave ground for 
that supposition; the very bad, because they were 
known to be for sale to the highest bidder, so that 
their support carried no weight. 

The growth of the free soil party in the North 
and the consequent agitation in favor of secession 
in the South gave the press a somewhat greater 
importance and influence in party councils. The 
slavery question was one which could not be dealt 
with by the old political methods of discussion and 
compromise. A kind of popular feeling was grow- 
ing up in both North and South which the politi- 
cians who framed the compromises of 1848 were 
powerless to control. Under such circumstances 
journals like the Springfield Republican, the New 
York Tribune, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 155 

the North, or like the Charleston Mercury and — to 
take an instance of a different kind — De Bow's 
Review in the South, were making the opinion 
which the politicians had to be content to follow. 
The press in 1860 was thus a far more potent factor 
'in politics than it had been ten years earlier. But 
it was not as yet a dominant factor. People still 
liked better to listen to debates than to read 
editorials; they still preferred to form their 
opinion from the spoken word rather than from 
the printed page. Nor were the newspapers and 
reviews in any true sense independent of party. 
They did more to make the party than they did 
before, but when it was made they stood closely 
by it as an organization. For the sake of mould- 
ing the opinions of their fellow Republicans or 
Democrats on some points, they were content to 
forego the privilege of expressing their own 
personal views upon others. 

The real power of the press in politics — the 
power possessed by a paper that tells people the 
things they want to know, in the face of the 
hostility of one party machine and the indiffer- 
ence of another — was accidentally discovered by 
the New York Times in the summer of 1871. 
Tweed was at that time in complete control of the 
city government. The efforts of political rivals 



156 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

to shake his dominance, within his own party or 
outside of it, had proved futile. The attempts to 
overthrow him by conventional methods were 
abortive. The Democratic machine throughout the 
state was his to direct. Even the Republican 
leaders were unwilling to engage in active oppo- 
sition to a system of plunder which, though 
organized on a larger scale than their own, was 
yet a natural development of political methods 
with which they were familiar and by which many 
of them profited. 

While matters were in this shape, a bookkeeper 
in one of the departments of the city government 
had gradually collected evidence that the public 
was being robbed on a large scale. He offered this 
evidence to one New York paper after another. 
Incredible as it may now seem, one paper after 
another refused it. The newspapers of that day 
were afraid to publish facts which the party 
machine preferred to keep quiet. Finally the New 
York Times undertook the campaign of publicity. 
I am told that it did so with much reluctance and 
grave apprehension of the possible consequences 
to itself. But the Times was not being very 
actively supported or highly valued by the Repub- 
lican machine at the time; and it decided to take 
the chance that the people might be interested to 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 157 

read the detailed evidence as to the way in which 
millions of dollars were being extracted from their 
pockets every month. 

The result astounded the proprietors of the 
Times as much as it did anybody else. Men who 
had listened apathetically when orators like 
Beecher or Evarts described the way in which the 
city was being plundered seized eagerly upon the 
facts when they were put before them in cold type. 
The printed page had come into its own heritage. 
It could do things which the spoken word could 
not do. People called for copies of the Times 
faster than the press could furnish them. These 
were days when the sale of other papers on trains 
and on the streets had practically ceased, because 
people wanted the Times and nothing else. I can 
myself remember the distressed lament of some 
of the Republican leaders that people would insist 
on getting the Times, whose party regularity was 
not above suspicion, merely because it gave them 
the information they desired, when they could 
have got the same information reprinted in other 
papers one day later without sacrifice of their 
party consciences. But it was in vain that they 
protested. The Staats-Zeitung joined with the 
Times by publishing the facts in the German 
tongue. Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly drove 



158 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

the lesson home by his inimitable cartoons. In two 
short months public opinion, formed under the 
influence of these three newspapers, became over- 
whelming in its force. The Cooper Union meeting 
of April 6th, before the newspaper disclosures, had 
accomplished nothing. The Cooper Union meeting 
of September 4th, after the newspaper disclosures, 
was a political upheaval. The indictment of 
corrupt officials followed in October, a crushing 
defeat for Tammany as an organization in the 
elections of November; and before the close of the 
calendar year the power of Tweed was at an end. 

The experience of the New York Times in 1871 
taught at least two distinct lessons : first, that facts 
presented by a newspaper were more effective than 
the same facts presented by orators of eminence; 
second, that if a newspaper had such facts in its 
possession it could commercially afford to print 
them even if the party leaders did not wish them 
printed. But the press of the country was rather 
slow to learn these lessons. A few newspapers in 
our larger cities assumed an attitude of political 
independence in municipal affairs. A somewhat 
larger number adopted the policy of giving an 
unvarnished tale of facts in their news columns 
as distinct from their editorial pages. It was not 
until about ten years later that Joseph Pulitzer 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 159 

familiarized the public with the theory that a 
newspaper's first duty was to give its readers 
information. It was Pulitzer's principle to decide 
whether a thing should be published and in what 
shape a thing should be published, solely on the 
basis of its value as news; with relatively little 
reference to political or moral considerations, 
except so far as these considerations might affect 
the readability of the article and the consequent 
sale of the paper. 

Of the good and the evil that was brought into 
journalism by this new method, as introduced by 
Pulitzer and carried out still further by some of 
his followers, I shall not undertake to speak in 
detail. We are concerned only with its great and 
almost revolutionary consequences upon the rela- 
tion between newspapers and parties. No longer 
could the party leader hope that a view of the 
facts which was accepted as profitable by him and 
his associates in a convention would be presented 
to the public by a devoted band of newspaper 
followers and received as gospel truth by nine 
tenths of the men who read those newspapers. 
The statement had to be what the newspaper men 
themselves regarded as profitable for them to 
publish. The power of moulding public opinion 
had passed out of the hands of the party leader 



160 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

and into those of the editor. And as if the poli- 
tician's troubles with the daily press were not 
enough, weekly and monthly papers rose in great 
numbers which undertook with more or less success 
to tell the people the facts which the editors 
thought that they wanted; publications which did 
for the members of the rural community what the 
daily papers did for the people of our larger cities 
in giving them data, sometimes right and some- 
times wrong, for judging public questions inde- 
pendently of party utterances. 

Is this change in the method of organizing 
public opinion a good one or a bad one? The old- 
fashioned man of affairs, whether in politics or 
out of it, is inclined to think it almost wholly bad. 
The editor of the new school and the reader who 
takes his opinion from the editor are apt to think 
it wholly good. The truth, as usual, lies between 
the two extremes. It is a change which is pre- 
dominantly for the better, but one which has 
possibilities of evil as well as of good. And 
according £is the press uses its new power for evil 
or for good will the results of the referendum and 
the direct primary, and other similar agencies of 
modern democracy, be also evil or good. 

The organization of public opinion by the news- 
papers instead of by the party managers has 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 161 

certain distinct and obvious advantages. In the 
first place, it involves a more direct appeal to 
reason. A newspaper owes its power to the fact 
that its readers think as its editor wishes them to 
think. Their opinion may be right or wrong. The 
evidence presented to them may be complete or 
incomplete. But the opinion is in any case a real 
opinion, based on an examination of important 
statements. 

In the next place, this opinion is formed in the 
open instead of being shaped by secret conferences, 
as was so often the case under old-fashioned party 
leadership. The newspaper makes its appeal in 
broad daylight. If the appeal is an unfair one, 
those who are arguing on the other side have at 
least a chance to see what is being said and done 
by their opponents and to try to prove that it is 
unfair. Government by newspapers is government 
by discussion. It is perhaps the only form of 
government by discussion which is practicable in 
a large community. 

In the third place, the appeal which the news- 
paper makes to its readers almost necessarily takes 
the form of an appeal to their judgment rather 
than to their selfishness. A party manager work- 
ing under the old system is constantly occupied in 
pointing out to his followers how their personal 



162 UNDEECURRENTS IN POLITICS 

interests would be advanced by some measure or 
some candidate. A newspaper or magazine that 
should adopt this policy would soon find its 
influence confined within a limited circle. The 
general public would suspect, and rightly suspect, 
that a measure which one group of voters was 
urged to support on purely selfish grounds would 
be of doubtful benefit to the community as a whole. 
A journalist may himself often be led to support 
certain measures or certain candidates for reasons 
of self-interest. But his appeal to his readers for 
support must be placed on broader grounds than 
this in order to be effective. 

Such are the patent and obvious advantages of 
having the organization of popular opinion left in 
the hands of the public press. They are so funda- 
mental in character that we are sometimes tempted 
to overlook the disadvantages and dangers with 
which this process is attended. The very fact that 
makes the appeal of the press an almost ideal agency 
in democratic government when rightly used, corre- 
spondingly increases the perils when it is used 
wrongly. The power of an editor is a power to 
influence public thinking. If he confines himself 
to legitimate methods of infiuence he realizes 
Bagehot's ideal of government by discussion. If 
he uses it wrongly and leads his readers to act on 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 163 

imperfect information, lie not only turns the 
action of tlie government into wrong channels, but 
he effects the more permanent and disastrous harm 
of poisoning public opinion at its source. 

I do not mean that this last in its extreme form 
is a very common thing. "While unscrupulous men 
occasionally acquire power as journalists, they are 
no more numerous in that profession than in any 
other. But there is a good deal of danger of 
unintentional poisoning of public opinion; danger 
that the journalist, in his honest desire to promote 
a particular measure, will encourage the public in 
habits and methods of thought which are antago- 
nistic to the success of democratic government. 

The first and most frequent source of harm is 
that while he is pretending to appeal to the 
judgment of his readers he really appeals to their 
emotion. 

A man who desires to make his newspaper 
popular is under a constant temptation to pander 
to the prejudices of his public. Without actually 
making grave misstatements, he can print the facts 
which they like in large type and suppress or 
relegate to obscure columns the facts which they 
do not like. Under these circumstances their 
judgment is distorted and their preconceived 
impressions confirmed, until they become incapable 



164 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 

of weighing the real evidence on which their 
political action ought to be based. If another 
paper tries to furnish them the true facts, they 
disbelieve it. They are accessible only to the kind 
of evidence that their own particular journal 
prefers to furnish. 

The editor, under such circumstances, often 
makes the excuse that he gave his readers what 
they wanted. Even if he were an ordinary private 
citizen, this excuse would hardly pass current. 
The man who puts aniline dyes into children's 
candy is not excused by the fact that the children 
like to have their candy bright colored. And the 
newspaper man is not an ordinary private citizen. 
\ He is by the course of recent events put into a 
place of public responsibility. He has it in his 
power more than any other man to see that the 
country is governed well or ill. If he enables his 
readers to base their votes on organized informa- 
tion he does service. If he leads them to base those 
votes on organized emotion he does irreparable 
wrong. 

I do not know whether it was President Lowell 
or some one else who coined the phrase "organized 
emotion." "Whoever may have been the inventor, 
it is an accurate description of something which 
gravely threatens the stability of American govern- 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 165 

ment. Every student of history knows what 
fearful mistakes democracies have made under the 
influence of emotion evoked by popular orators; 
how thousands of men, listening to an appeal to 
prejudice veiled in the form of exposition of fact, 
have taken leave of their judgment and brought 
their commonwealths to the brink of ruin or even 
beyond it. Our own people have not been wholly 
exempt from this danger. ''The curse of the 
country," said Daniel Webster in a moment of 
bitterness, ' ' has been its orators. ' ' This dangerous 
gift of the orator, of making emotion take the place 
of information, is one to which the newspaper 
has today fallen heir. 

The danger which will result to the common- 
wealth if our political action is based on organized 
emotion rather than organized information is 
peculiarly great in connection with the direct 
primary. 

Under the old-fashioned system of nomination 
by party conventions, two questions were always 
asked concerning a candidate: first, did the party 
want him? and second, could he be elected? It 
was not enough for the leaders to know whether 
the candidate was popular with the majority of 
their followers. It was an equally important 
question — in fact, in a great many instances a much 



166 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 

more important question — whether he could attract 
a sufficient number of votes from the opposite 
party, or hold a sufficient number of doubtful votes 
within his own party, to make his election reason- 
ably certain. The managers wanted to get the 
strongest candidate they could; and the strongest 
candidate was not always the man for whom his 
party associates were most enthusiastic. He was 
commonly a man of more moderate views than 
they. Take a salient instance, which has now 
become historical. In the presidential campaign 
of 1860, if the Republican convention had consulted 
the wishes of the majority of voters within the 
party it would have nominated Seward. He had 
taken strong ground against slavery; and northern 
Republicans who were excited by the heat of our 
slavery contest saw in him their natural champion. 
But sagacious men knew that Seward could not 
be elected, and convinced the convention of the 
soundness of that view. It nominated Lincoln — a 
man who spoke less of abstract principles than 
Seward and more of constitutional law; less of the 
abolition of slavery — however much he may have 
had this at heart — and more of the preservation 
of the Union. The nomination of Lincoln was a 
distinct disappointment to extremists throughout 
the North; but it appealed to moderate men in 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 167 

states adjoining the Potomac and the Ohio, whose 
votes were necessary and sufficient to elect him. 

This instance is a tjrpical one. The convention 
system has been distinctly favorable to the nomi- 
nation of businesslike candidates for the principal 
offices — of candidates who were unsatisfactory to 
some of the extreme elements in their own party 
and satisfactory to the moderate men in the 
opposite party. It has tended to give us men who 
appealed to the country instead of appealing to a 
group. With the substitution of the direct primary 
we are bound to lose something of this advantage. 
We are almost certain to see a larger number of 
candidates who represent extreme views on either 
side. To prevent this danger from becoming fatal 
the press of the country will have to recognize the 
responsibility that is placed in its hands by the 
new conditions, and strive to moderate rather than 
to accelerate the tides of unreasoning emotion. 

Closely akin to the appeal to prejudice is the 
appeal to impatience; and there is great danger 
that the modern editor will be tempted to make 
use of this appeal to the detriment of good 
government. 

The work of governing a commonwealth — 
nation, state, or city — is a complicated and difficult 
piece of business. It never goes wholly right. The 



168 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

statesman must sacrifice some things which he 
regards as highly desirable in order to secure other 
things which he deems fundamentally essential. 
He alone knows how necessary the sacrifice is and 
how much he himself regrets it. The man who 
looks on from outside thinks that the statesman is 
doing it lightly. Such a man sees the loss to the 
shipper from allowing an increased railroad rate. 
He does not see that he must let the railroad charge 
that rate in order to secure the necessary develop- 
ment of the transportation system of the commu- 
nity. He sees the loss from having American 
vessels pay tolls in the Panama Canal. He does 
not see the gain in foreign relations due to the 
adoption of an honorable policy. A journalist is 
tempted to make himself popular by voicing the 
complaints of his readers. By advocating a short- 
sighted policy which works for today only, he can 
make a profit for himself; and few of those who 
buy his paper foresee the loss that comes to the 
country if his advice is followed, or put the blame 
on his shoulders after it has come. 

This sort of captious criticism is one of the 
incidental evils which has attended government 
by discussion in all ages and in every state. 
"Armies," says Macaulay, "have won victories 
under bad generals, but no army ever won a 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 169 

victory under a debating society." Once let the 
officials of a democracy be placed at the mercy of 
a purely critical press, and the efficiency of 
American democracy — not to say American democ- 
racy itself — is at an end. It is this that makes 
the proposed institution of the recall so perilous. 
The recall is based on the theory that people should / 
be encouraged to judge of a man's work when it 
is half done. On terms like these efficient and far- 
sighted administration is impossible. The recall 
may seem to be justified in a few cases where an 
official has palpably betrayed his trust without 
quite rendering himself liable to impeachment; 
but for one case of that kind where it does good, 
there are likely to be a dozen cases where it will 
prevent an official from assuming the sacrifices 
and incurring the odium which any farsighted 
plan of government is apt to involve before its 
results are understood. 

Most of the public discussion of the recall has 
centered about the recall of judges. We are told 
that the judicial office is something apart by itself, 
and that there are special dangers which make the 
recall inapplicable in this particular instance. I 
believe that this distinction between the recall of 
judges and the recall of other officials is an essen- 
tially false one; that every official should be 



170 UNDEECURRENTS IN POLITICS 

allowed to serve out his term, except in case of 
misconduct or incapacity; and that the nation 
which claims the right to change its mind as to 
the fitness of an official during the middle of his 
term is proving its incapacity for democratic 
government. It is either unwilling to take the 
proper care in the selection of officials or unable 
to have patience until the allotted work is done 
before passing judgment on its merits. 

A third danger to which the press is subject is 
the assumption of omniscience. In this respect, 
as in the other two that I have just named, the 
newspaper or magazine is simply falling in with 
the prepossessions of its readers. We all rather 
like to feel that we know everything that is worth 
knowing. The present tendencies in our education, 
which lead us to scatter our study over a large 
range of subjects, tend to strengthen this feeling. 
Small wonder, then, that the newspaper, bringing 
a vast range of information within reach of the 
people, should claim to inform them on many 
details of business and politics, of science and art, 
which must necessarily be left to the judgment of 
the expert if they are to be effectually dealt with 
in practice. The editor is constantly tempted to 
flatter his readers into believing that they know 
everything about government which is worth know- 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 171 

ing, and that anybody who claims to know more 
than the general public is either an aristocrat or 
an impostor. 

There is a theory that if you only find out what 
the people want you will know what the govern- 
ment ought to do. Like most political aphorisms, 
this is a mixture of truth and falsehood, of prac- 
tical good sense and unpractical idealism. If we 
mean by this statement that the ideals of the people 
and the policy of the government must be in 
harmony, and that one cannot be a great deal 
better or a great deal worse than the other without 
strain and damage and threat of revolution, it is 
right. But if we interpret it to mean that the 
people as a whole are competent to decide how the 
business of government should be managed in each 
particular instance, it is wrong. This distinction 
is as old as Aristotle's Politics itself. Aristotle 
showed how the state which deserves the title of 
"republic" is one where the laws conform to the 
general wishes of the people, but where at the same 
time people are content to elect, for the actual 
conduct of a nation's affairs, men better trained 
than themselves in the details of public business. 

Among the qualities needed to make a democracy 
successful I should agree with Aristotle in laying 
great emphasis upon the readiness to value experts 



172 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

as they deserve to be valued. The larger and more 
complex the affairs of the state, the less is it pos- 
sible for each member of the people to inform 
himself on all the details of public business. In a 
small country town each intelligent citizen is 
competent to fill almost any office at short notice. 
In a city it requires training to be a successful head 
of one of the departments. In a nation the need of 
specialization for the proper command of the army 
and navy and for the proper administration of 
justice is even more conspicuously necessary. 
Amid the keen competition that now exists between 
different peoples, the permanent influence of the 
United States depends on having its public service 
carried on with a high degree of technical efficiency. 
The more complex our development is, the more 
urgent is the need of self-restraint and modesty 
in our public opinion; such self-restraint and 
modesty as will lead us to be content with judging 
the expert by the results which he achieves instead 
of trying to prescribe the methods that he shall 
follow. 

If we really value experts properly we must 
show our faith by our works and be prepared to 
pay them more in the future than we have been 
willing to pay them in the past. The parsimony 
of the American people in this respect has become 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 173 

a. byword. The salaries of our officers in the army 
and the navy are notoriously low as compared with 
what men of equal ability could obtain in private 
business. We refuse to give our judges more than 
a fraction of the income which they could obtain 
by the practice of their profession. We take the 
ground that the honor of serving the country is so 
great that a man should be content to do it at 
great pecuniary sacrifice. Fortunately there are 
many able men among us who are content to accept 
public service on these niggardly terms. Some 
have private fortunes of their own. Some are 
willing to remain poor for the sake of doing their 
duty to an ungrateful commonwealth. But the 
general effect of our unwillingness to grant first- 
rate salaries to first-rate men is deplorable. The 
waste due to inefficient work and unnecessary red 
tape is vastly in excess of the economy realized. 
To save a few hundred thousand dollars in our 
diplomatic service, we lose millions in our dealings 
with other states. We are undertaking to hold our 
place among the nations of the world in a competi- 
tion which grows every year more keen. But the 
United States is the one country which begrudges 
the money necessary and the expert ability neces- 
sary to give its citizens a high-grade public service 
at home and abroad. 



174 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

Besides placing the proper value upon the ser- 
vices of officials, we must also be prepared to give 
them a proper degree of independence. We must 
not keep nagging at them. 

In a well-managed private business the man at 
the head keeps careful control of the general policy 
and takes great pains to select good men to attend 
to the several parts. But he does not spend his 
time interfering with their management of details. 
If he did, it would interfere both with his efficiency 
in his work and with their efficiency in theirs. 
What is true of the individual head of a private 
business is even more true of the directors of a 
well-managed corporation. They determine the 
policy, and choose the men to carry it out. In 
order to have time and strength to do these things 
wisely, they leave the details of engineering and 
of accounting to the officials whom they have 
selected for the purpose. 

The position of a voter in a democracy is essen- 
tially that of a director rather than that of an 
official. It is his function to place the right men 
at the head of certain departments of the govern- 
ment and prescribe the ends which they should 
try to attain. The means by which they are to 
reach these ends should generally be left to the 
judgment of the officials themselves. But this 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 175 

principle, which is understood in every well- 
conducted private business, is not understood in 
public business. We lay more stress on the need 
of watching our officers than we should, and less 
stress on the need of choosing them carefully and 
leaving them to themselves. Instead of rejoicing 
when we can put a department of the government 
in the hands of a man who knows more than we 
do about the methods of conducting it, we are 
jealous of superior knowledge and watch its 
manifestations with suspicion. 

There are certain points on which it is possible 
for the citizens of the community as a body to 
form an intelligent public opinion. There are cer- 
tain other points on which opinion is valueless 
without technical training behind it ; and the deci- 
sion of these points must be left to the different 
groups of men who have the expert knowledge 
which is necessary. The whole town can decide 
where a bridge ought to be built and how much 
should be spent in building it. It requires knowl- 
edge of mathematics to know how to design the 
bridge, and knowledge of physics and chemistry 
to know what sort of materials to use in its con- 
struction. The whole community can know whether 
it wants to have railroads owned by the govern- 
ment or by private corporations. It requires 



176 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 

knowledge of engineering to know how to locate 
such railroads properly, and knowledge of political 
economy to know what system of rates can be 
adopted. Any attempt to settle scientific matters 
by public opinion means rotten bridges and bank- 
rupt railroads. 

The American people has made some progress 
toward learning this lesson. We no longer entrust 
politicians with the command of armies, as was so 
frequently done in Athens or Rome. A proposal 
to take the conduct of the army in the field out 
of the hands of army officers and put it into the 
hands of members of Congress, which was seriously 
urged in 1848, would seem quite laughable today. 
But we need to carry the lesson further in the 
next century than we have in the last. We are 
in more immediate competition with Europe now 
than we were fifty years ago. To keep our place 
in this competitive struggle, we must prove that 
a democracy can manage business as well as a 
monarchy; that it can show the same care in the 
selection of officials and the same self-restraint in 
judging of their work before it is done. The people 
as a whole must assume the double duty of voting 
intelligently on matters which public opinion can 
decide and leaving to the specialist matters which 
can only be decided by the specialist; of holding 



SEAT OF POWER TODAY 177 

the expert responsible for results and promoting 
the man who has done business well rather 
than the one who flatters the people that he is 
going to do business in a way they will like and 
understand. Thus, and thus only, can we com- 
bine two things which are equally essential to 
American democracy if it is to hold its place among 
the nations: popular sovereignty and efficient 
government. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Acts of Parliament, 141; 
contrasted with Acts of 
Congress, 42 

Adams, Charles Francis, 71 

Anti-Trust Act of 1890, 74, 
75, 87-89 

Arbitration Acts, 78, 87 

Aristocracy, in American 
colonies, 3-11, 36; perma- 
nence of, in South, 56, 57 

Aristotle, on democracy, 90, 
91, 97, 98 ; ideal of repub- 
lic, 171 

Ashley, W. J., 35 

Bagehot, Walter, 162 
Banking laws, 50, 51 
Bentham, Jeremy, 43, 44 
Brokerage in politics, 100, 

101, 121 
Bryce, James, 23 
Burr, Aaron, 13, 110, 111 

Capital, legal position of, 

27, 29; scarcity of, 49-51 
Caucus system, 108, 109 
Charleston Mercury, 155 
Charters, as contracts, 55; 

abuses connected with 

grant, 143 
Checks and balances, 98 
Chevalier, Michel, 21 
Church and state in New 

England, 4, 5 



Civil service, federal, 116, 
117; present condition of, 
91-93; reform of, 127, 
134-137 

Civil "War, industrial effects 
of, 56-59, 64, 65, 118-120 

Class consciousness, 79 

Classified civil service, 137 

Clay, Henry, 112 

Colonial charters and state 
constitutions, 10, 11 

Colonies, aristocracy in, 3-11 

Commerce and Labor, De- 
partment of, 86 

Company stores, 29 

Competition in England and 
in the United States, 59- 
63 

Congress and nominating 
power, 108, 109 

Congressional caucus, 108, 
109 

Constitution, Federal, and 
democracy, 11, 12; condi- 
tions affecting adoption 
of, 37-42; permanence of, 
102-104 

Constitutional Convention of 
1787, 38-40 

Constitutions in Western 
states, 143-145 

Contract, obligation of, 39, 
40 



182 



INDEX 



Convention, nomination hj, 

109-111, 142, 143, 165- 

168 
Corporations, growth of, 51- 

53; legal position of, 53- 

56 
Cost of living, increase of, 

81-83 
Courts, authority of, 42-47 

Dartmouth College case, 53- 

55 
De Bow's Eeview, 155 
Declaration of Independ- 
ence, indirect effects of, 
15, 16 
Democracy in America, 

actual beginnings of, 20 
Democratic party, 24, 27, 
108; relation to Sherman 
Act, 88; to silver inter- 
ests, 121 
Department of Labor, 77 
Direct primary, 146-151 
Due process of law, 40 

Educational tendencies, 170 
Election of president, 105- 

107 
Employers ' liability, 28 ; 

federal Act, 86 
England, labor legislation 
in, 28; limits to competi- 
tion in, 59-63 
Equality, sentiment of, 16 
Experts, position of, in 
America, 171-174 



Extra-constitutional powers, 
104 

Factory Acts, 28, 77 

Earrand, Max, 14, 23, 41 

Federal Constitution, condi- 
tions affecting adoption 
of, 37-42; permanence of, 
102-104 

Federal offices as rewards 
of party service, 116, 117 

Federalist party, 12, 108 

Feudal and industrial ten- 
ures, 33-36 

Fink, Albert, 71 

Ford, H. J., 110 

Fourteenth Amendment, 53- 
56 

Franchises, grant of, 118, 
143 

Freehold ownership, 48 

Freehold suffrage, 3 

George, Henry, 79, 80 
Government, functions of, 

62, 63, 68 
Granger movement, 65-70, 

124-126 

Hamilton, Alexander, 13, 

49; land policy of, 17-20 
Harper's Weekly, 157 
Hildreth on colonial history, 

8, 9 
Hobbes, Thomas, 43, 44 
Hours of labor, regulation 
of, 28, 86 



INDEX 



183 



Immigrants, opportunities 
for, 48, 49; change in 
character of, 77, 78 

Impatience, newspaper ap- 
peal to, 167 

Incorporation Acts of colo- 
nies, 51 

Interlocking directorates, 83, 
84 

International Workers of 
the World, 79 

Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission, 89, 126 

Interstate commerce law, 71, 
72; supplemented by ad- 
ditional Acts, 86 

Iowa, referendum in, 145 

Jackson, Andrew, 20, 21, 
115, 116, 134, 135; atti- 
tude toward corporations, 
52, 53 

Jefferson, Thomas, 12-14, 19 

Joint stock companies, 51- 
53 

Judges, recall of, 169 

Judson, F. N., 88 

Knights of Labor, 78 

Labor, Department of, 77 

Lamar, L. Q. C, 107 

Land laws, 16-20 

Legislation by representa- 
tive assembly, 137-144 

Limited liability in the 
United States, 51, 52 



Lincoln, Abraham, nomina- 
tion of, 166, 167 
Louisiana purchase, 19 
Lowell, A. L., 164; on 
party government, 99-101 

Macaulay, T. B., 168 

McMaster, J. B., 23 

Marshall, John, 47 

Massachusetts, early social 
system, 4-6; labor legis- 
lation, 28; corporation 
laws, 52; railroad regula- 
tion, 71, 72 

Middle colonies, social sys- 
tem of, 7 

Military tenures, 34-36 

Mississippi valley, develop- 
ment of, 19, 65-69 

Money power, jealousy of, 
81, 83-85 

Monopoly, 59, 60 ; legal posi- 
tion of, 70; extension of, 
72-75 

Montesquieu, 98, 140 

Myers, Gustavus, 110 

National spirit, beginnings 

of, 15 
New England, early social 

system of, 4-6 
New York, land holding in, 

7; state politics in, 115 
New York Staats-Zeitung, 

157 
New York Times, 155-158 
New York Tribune, 154 



184 



INDEX 



Newspapers, influence on 

politics, 152-159 
Nomination, by conventions, 

165-168 ; of president, 

105, 106, 108-110 
Nullification, 45, 46 

Organized emotion, 164 
Ostrogorski, M. L., 23, 148 

Paper money, effects of, 57, 

58 
Parliament, authority of, 42, 

43; early history of, 138- 

140 
Party, perversion of, 99; 

two meanings of, 99-102 
Party regularity, 128-131 
Passive resistance, 45-46 
Patroon system, 7 
Pennsylvania, state politics 

in, 115 
Plantation system, 8 
Politicians, professional, 

112-114, 122-124 
Popular election of senators, 

132-134 
Predatory wealth, 124-126 
Preemption Acts, 18 
Presidential election, 105- 

107 
Prices, rise of, 81-83 
Primary, direct, 146-151 
Professional politicians, 151- 

153 
Progress and Poverty, 79, 80 
Progressive taxation, 28, 29 



Property owner, legal posi- 
tion of, 27, 29, 32-42 

Property qualifications of 
ofl&ce holders, 11 

Protection, 58, 59 

Public land, 16-20 

Public opinion, agencies for 
forming, 141 ; unorgan- 
ized, 149; sphere of, 175 

Public utilities, 72-74 

Publicity of railroad ac- 
counts, 71 

Pulitzer, Joseph, 158-160 

Eailroad regulation, 30, 65- 
72; in England, 60 

Eailroads, present economic 
condition of, 89 

Eecall, 147, 148; theory of, 
169 

Eeferendum, 145, 146 

Eegularity, party, 128-131 

Eepresentative government, 
theory of, 106-108, 137- 
139 

Eepublican form of govern- 
ment, interpretation of, 
12 

Eepublican party, attitude 
on tariff, 120, 121; on 
civil service reform, 135, 
136 

Eestraint of trade, 74 

Eoman parallels to New 
England history, 5, 6 

Eoot, Elihu, 149, 150; on 
party government, 99-101 



INDEX 



185 



Saint Paul Pioneer Press, 

154 
Salaries of American offi- 
cials, 173 
Senators, popular election 

of, 132-134 
Separation of national and 
local issues, 127, 128, 132- 
134 
Seward, W. H., 166 
Sherman Act, 74, 75, 87-89 
Silver coinage, 58, 121 
Slavery, political effect of, 
8, 24; extension of, 26; 
influence on political 
methods, 154, 155 
Social contract, 43, 44 
Socialistic movements in 

America, 30, 31, 76-79 
South Carolina, property 

qualifications in, 11 
South Dakota, referendum 

in, 145 
Southern colonies, social sys- 
tem of, 7-10 
Sovereignty, doctrine of, 43- 

46 
Spoils system, 134, 135 
Springfield Eepubliean, 154 
State constitutions, and colo- 
nial charters, 10, 11; 
modern form of, 143-145 
State socialism, recent move- 
ments toward, 76-79 
Subsidies, 53, 65, 66, 118 



Suffrage, colonial restric- 
tions on, 3; universal, 21 

Supreme Court of the 
United States, 46, 47 

Switzerland, referendum in, 
145 

Tammany Hall, 13, 110-114, 

158 
Tariff legislation, 115, 118- 

121 
Taxation, progressive, 28, 

29 
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 21- 

23 
Tweed Eing, 129, 130, 155- 

158 

Unconstitutionality, 42-47 
Unearned increment, 80 

Van Bur en, Martin, 111-113 
Virginia, colonial organiza- 
tion in, 8-10 

Wages in England and 

America, 61, 62 
War of 1812, effects of, 16 
Webster, Daniel, 54, 165 
West, settlement of, 16-20; 

social system of, 25, 26 j 

financial legislation in, 

50 
Weyl, W. E., 33 
Whig party, 24, 27 
Wortman, Tennis, 111 



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